Hedgewars runs super slow on Win7 occasionally

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Lord Toothpsate
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Sometimes when I load up Hedgewars the game runs at less then 1FPS, it gets to the point where two people can finish their turns before I notice the first person even has a free turn.
This happens both in single and multiplayer. It's not my hardware because I run more intensive games just fine.

Looking into the problem a bit more I found out that the "System" process (task manager -> show processes from all users -> sort by name -> System (NT Kernal & System) ) ends up using around 40-50% of my CPU when Hedgewars is running slow. If I restart my computer it fixes the problem and the "System" process now uses only 2-4% CPU when playing Hedgewars, and the game runs fine. "System" only uses this much CPU when playing Hedgewars and never the first time after a restart (so far) and also only happens after I wake my computer up from Sleeping (but not always).

There may be a bug in the Windows code that is causing this to happen, or it may be local. If anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate it.

Smaxx
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Sounds weird. Maybe something wrong with your graphics card drivers? Are they up to date? "System" should be at 0% almost all the time with about 100 KByte memory usage.

Lord Toothpsate
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I know, and my graphics drivers are up to date.

It just happened again and I had it working perfectly 3-4 hours ago and I didn't restart, sleep, or anything else in between.

Palewolf
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Wild guess... maybe your system is overheating and goes into low power mode sometimes?

Lord Toothpsate
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Okay this just got weirder. I just played one game of hedgewars just fine, the very next game, less then 5 min later without even exiting the game, System shoots up to 50% and I and unable to play anymore. My system is not overheating either. This is super frustrating to have to restart my computer right before I want to play.

Palewolf
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There's only one instance of hwengine running at all times?

Lord Toothpsate
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Yes only one instance

nemo
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WRT what palewolf said - might want to check process manager to see hwengine actually exited

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Lord Toothpsate
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There was only one instance running.

Anyway, I think I figured it out. When I have a voice chat program such as Ventrillo or Skype running, this occurs. I did a test earlier where I did no Skype, ran fine, Skype open, ran slow, no Skype, ran fine again. Now I'm pretty sure there have been a few times where I've had neither running and this problem has still happened, but for the moment it seems that closing any voice chat program fixes the problem.

bananaoomarang
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OK that sounds pretty strange. Does skype eat up RAM and cpu? What OS are you on? If you are using linux try running from a command line and see if you get any errors. Is it only when specifically hedgewars and skype are running or have you tried running other games with skype. If possible try a game using SDL and see what happens.

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szczur
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He's runnning Hedgewars on Windows 7 as topic says Smile

Press any key to continue, or any other key to cancel.

bananaoomarang
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Ahh right. Sorry. My bad.

Pit has finaly returned. FINALY.

Tazer
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I can kinda confirm that. I'm running HW 0.9.13 on Athlon X2 5400+, NV GeForce 8600 (fanless Big Grin) and Win7, with 2GB RAM. This gets me to about 4fps, in all modes. My drivers are up to date. I'll probably make this its own thread later on, but I do believe I'm on topic here. Also, HW runs perfectly on my Linux Mint installation on the same computer.

Additionally, I was experiencing the issue described here and applied the fix. I still have to use reduce quality: http://www.hedgewars.org/node/2072

Smaxx
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Seems like your card is somehow missing OpenGL hardware acceleration. But overall the card should be able to provide that capability without any issues on any edition of Windows XP, Vista or 7. Have you tried any other OpenGL based games?

Tazer
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Whoops. Scratch the part where I said I had the latest drivers. I hadn't been playing games, so forgot to install them after (re?)installing Win7. I tried a OpenGL benchmark utility, sure enough, it refused to work. Apparently the Win7 default driver does not do OpenGL on that card (maybe at all? dunno.) So I installed the NV driver, and now it works very well. Big Grin Thanks, Smaxx.

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