I need a new laptop

I found the strangest fix to my SRB2 netplay problem. I messed around with Windows Task Manager, and it turns out that srb2win.exe runs better in netgames when I set its priority at its lowest setting, whereas if I set its priority to realtime, the framerate lag gets much, much worse. In fact, this laptop's a duo processor, and I've tried running netgames on one processor and both processors respectively, and honestly I think it runs even better if I set it at one processor. Try and figure that one out.



My guess is that there's some process that handles the netplay part of SRB2, and the more srb2win.exe is emphasized, the less focus the computer puts on the online process. I don't know. Anyone else have an idea?

First of all, I should probably mention that under no circumstance should you ever set a process to run at Realtime priority unless you know what you're doing.

Secondly, a lot of older game engines were designed with just a single core in mind. I was perhaps one of the first people in this community with a dual-core system, and I got to see some of these problems first-hand. The biggest issue by far was with uneven timing in games. This was due to each core running on their own clock, eventually desynchronizing and thus causing games to be jumpy. AMD had to release a "Dual-Core Optimizer" driver that periodically resynced the clocks of each core. Microsoft also had to release a hotfix for Windows XP that allowed it to properly handle dual-core and multi-core.

I think the most famous example at the time was Unreal. A lot of players reported problems with Unreal Tournament playing at the wrong speed (affectionately dubbed the "Benny Hill effect"). This was because the Unreal engine bypassed the operating system to access low level timing. One common suggestion for games experiencing issues on dual-core systems was to set the process affinity to just one core, so that a desync could not occur.

And if you remember, the SRB2 2.0 release was met with some criticism over performance issues. AJ mentioned switching process affinity to one core (and I believe it's also the default on newer versions), stating that, yes, SRB2 was not designed for multi-core.