FPS limiter

[yjune]

I wish more games would let you limit the FPS. I try to limit games to 20 to 30 fps, and vsync only limits it to 60. On Windows I used BanditCam, but I haven't found an option for Linux.

A FPS limiter would be helpful for those of us who play on laptops, so they don't get too hot. I don't really mind the heat, but I hate hearing that fan blowing really loud.

These older games don't need so much power, but they use it all anyway. My CPU is 2.56Ghz and it will use it all 100%. But if I limit my CPU to 1.6Ghz, the game runs just as good! It's a problem I notice in older games, even from 1997 or before.

I'm really enjoying openmw, thank you!

[Tarius]

If your laptop is getting too hot, you need to clean the dust out of it.

[yjune]

Umm... thanks for the reply, but I clean my laptop every other month or so and had thermal paste replaced mid december. My laptop isn't running hot at all. It's just running hot enough (when playing games) that the fan starts. Which is a pretty reasonable thing to expect, and isn't a problem itself, of course.

But I want a fps limiter because old games will eat up all the cpu available to them, even if they were made for a pentium or pentium II. That's stupid. They shouldn't eat upwards to 100% cpu on any modern computer. Gaming computer, at that. So I started forcing the laptop to run at 1.6ghz instead of 2.5ghz when playing these old games, because they don't need so much power. I get to save electricity that was needlessly wasted, and the fan doesn't even come on (yay!), so I don't get a headache from the noise.

I'm not saying to do it right now, I'm saying that eventually, it would be a nice thing to have.

Reducing the cpu hasn't affected game play quality since the games still have much, much more cpu than they were originally designed for.
If I can limit the fps as well, I can save more power, make my hardware last longer, and won't have headaches from the fan noise. I have tested this with other games. The playing quality doesn't get worse (on my particular specs).

The fps limiter would also be good for casual gamers like my husband, who generally don't buy gaming computers and don't upgrade often. He usually has to run lowest settings (I run max settings). Games that offer a fps limiter have made it possible for him to keep playing with me.

It would also help teenagers who often have to play on old, second-hand computers, or some junk their parents bought. If the openmw engine will be used to create other games, I imagine teenagers would be a big target audience for those games. If the fps limiter can be done in the engine, these games would inherit the option to use it, right?

(For those who are curious, I use the cpupower utility)

[SquireNed]

If your laptop is getting too hot, you need to clean the dust out of it.

Not always the case. My laptop's graphics card will boil water even directly after a cleaning because they didn't see fit to assume that people would use it at full load capacity for a long time (e.g. rendering stuff in Blender). The hardware doesn't match other parts of the hardware and heating becomes a potential issue.

I think a framerate limiter isn't something we should overlook. While I don't see any reason for it other than laptops and any other battery-powered devices it might run on, it's not a bad idea.

[Tarius]

Oh, well in this case I would recommend a cooling base. One that is fitted with fans etc.
But yes, I can understand that you might not want to waste electricity. With that said, I would think there is something to limit the amount of resources a given program can use. There has to be if it is at all possible.

[WeirdSexy]

OpenMW is an FPS limiter at the moment. I never go above 20 FPS or so

Kidding aside, keep in mind that OpenMW is not designed for the type of hardware you are talking about. It is a modern engine.

[raevol]

OpenMW is not designed for the type of hardware you are talking about. It is a modern engine.

I'd hate to be that guy at commercial companies that has to test games on various laptops and think "if this old laptop was loaded down with all the junk software the average user puts on their computer, would it overheat while running our game?"

[SquireNed]

One thing I note is that FPS highly depends on my use of the different renderers. For me DirectX runs at ~90 frames using Morrowind-esque settings, while OpenGL is more in the 20's. I'm not sure if this is because of quality differences (i.e. OpenGL doing more things better than DirectX is), since I'm not particularly astute, but it's kinda glaring. Not sure if that's an OpenMW-side tweak, but it's something to consider for optimization. Consider the fact that I can't tell the difference between 24 and 30 frames most of the time, and you'll see that there's just a bit of excess (my display's 60 goes woefully unappreciated).

[sirherrbatka]

Radeon, perhaps? Also, scrawl mentioned that OGRE 3D opengl backend is grossly inefficent.

[SquireNed]

I'm on an nvidia card so it shouldn't be Radeon based. If it's OGRE that would explain the difference.