Automatic pause/resume on game start (v7 feature request?)

[kc2lrc]

Hey everyone,

I've been hunting around for a way to accomplish this for a while without finding much, so I'll kick off a new topic.

I have been heading up a pretty successful effort to spread folding within Clarkson University's PC gaming club. Since many gamers have high powered machines with i7s, hexacores, and high-end NVIDIAs, this is quite an ideal group to be folding, and is pushing Clarkson's team up the list.

The issue we run into is that if we forget to pause or close folding before we start games, those games lag (caused by GPU or SMP clients). The results of this vary. Some gamers find folding to be more of a nuisance above all else and quit running it altogether, or forget to start it again sometimes for days on end, resulting in WUs getting blown up.

Ideally, we could have some sort of program that would detect running games and pause/stop folding, then restart it when games are closed. I have heard of two ways this can be accomplished: by detecting game processes from a list of known game .exe files, and by determining that a program has requested 3D acceleration from the GPU. But I have yet to find a program that actually implements something like this to start/stop FAH clients.

Another idea I had is to use Steam's status to determine whether a game is running or not. I have no idea how, or even if this is available to other programs, but this status would be an excellent way to determine if a game is running. Were this status not available outside Steam I don't know how hard it would be to get Valve to implement this.

More realistically, I think perhaps the best option would be implementing a well-documented switch that tells the v7 client to pause and resume upon the request of another program. This leaves it open for other software to be written that performs the actual game detection and tells the client when to pause and resume.

Well anyhow just putting out the idea. I hope to see this implemented in some form in the future and think it would be a win both for the science going on in the project (faster unit turnaround and less dropped units) and for gamers everywhere (far more transparent client.)

- Sam

[rjbelans]

You might want to check this out: http://fahtracker.forumotion.com/

It seems to have the feature you are looking for and it is pretty simple to get going too.

[PantherX]

When I run the SMP2 WUs, I haven't noticed any game lagging or anything. The same applies to the Classic Client. I have the priority set to idle in the Client and everything is running smoothly. However, the GPU Client needs to be paused. Nonetheless, I do wish that this feature will be implemented in v7.

[^w^ing]

When I run the SMP2 WUs, I haven't noticed any game lagging or anything.

I have, SMP2 core degrades game performance a lot as I noticed. If it's not a resource heavy game (or if it's not optimised for multicore), I usually just set affinity for the fahcore to first four processor cores and the game process to the last four cores (on i7 with HT on), SMP core works at steady half usual speed and the game runs as if the SMP core was shutdown.

[codysluder]

When I run the SMP2 WUs, I haven't noticed any game lagging or anything.

I have, SMP2 core degrades game performance a lot as I noticed. If it's not a resource heavy game (or if it's not optimised for multicore), I usually just set affinity for the fahcore to first four processor cores and the game process to the last four cores (on i7 with HT on), SMP core works at steady half usual speed and the game runs as if the SMP core was shutdown.

That's an intereresting way to use HT. Have you also tried to set Even numbered cores vs. Odd numbered cores?

[kc2lrc]

Thanks for the replies. I was testing this out yesterday with another gamer and found it to be an excellent utility. When it recognized a game, folding was gone within 20 seconds, and it returned right after the game exited.

The issue here (and I will bring this up in the FAHTracker forum where it belongs) is that the Games.txt list used by the program to determine what executables represent games is missing quite a few titles, or parts of popular titles - a good example is the presence of BlackOps.exe but the lack of BlackOpsMP.exe. Users can add files to their own lists, but this becomes a pain as new games come out.

So what we perhaps need is a community-created list of game .exes which can be merged into the list NVIDIA puts out, and the merged list would be downloaded whenever the game list is auto-updated. Then we would have folding and gaming perfection.

- Sam

[^w^ing]

That's an intereresting way to use HT. Have you also tried to set Even numbered cores vs. Odd numbered cores?

I meant to try that for a while since the way I did it until now, I don't really exploit HT as virtual cores/real core are sequentially coupled (in windows at least), but didn't get to it yet, I don't game that much anymore

Thanks for the replies. I was testing this out yesterday with another gamer and found it to be an excellent utility. When it recognized a game, folding was gone within 20 seconds, and it returned right after the game exited.

The issue here (and I will bring this up in the FAHTracker forum where it belongs) is that the Games.txt list used by the program to determine what executables represent games is missing quite a few titles, or parts of popular titles - a good example is the presence of BlackOps.exe but the lack of BlackOpsMP.exe. Users can add files to their own lists, but this becomes a pain as new games come out.

So what we perhaps need is a community-created list of game .exes which can be merged into the list NVIDIA puts out, and the merged list would be downloaded whenever the game list is auto-updated. Then we would have folding and gaming perfection.

- Sam

hmm that would be a nice feature to have of course, but there are many more important features that I'd like to see in v7 to be honest.