Regardless of how the graphics are displayed, full color or wire-frame, or somewhere in-between, it still doesn't explain what fold.it is doing with all the CPU usage when the client is essentially idle. Does it really need to do all that work to keep the graphics displayed on the screen when nothing is changing?
This has been going on since I started last July, so it's nothing new. It's always been a CPU hog.
At least not for me and the vista guy from above. If I did nothing, it was only 10% or even less.
A side question: what is the render_style in the option file? Mine is set to "cartoon" but are there other settings and what do they do?
There is really something wrong.
I had my Task Manager process list open when I started Fold.It just now. At the puzzle selection menu, it was already using 25% of the CPU resources of a dual core system. Hadn't even selected one yet. (Core 2 Duo, WinXP SP2, 2GB ram)
Once I selected a puzzle, it immediately shot up to 50% of the total CPU resources. This is without even touching the protein, and all view options turned off - so no animated bonds, no strobing colors. All chat windows and scoreboards closed. Page faults were clocking off at about 50K per second. Disconnected network cable or "play offline" didn't make a difference, so it's not using a lot of CPU trying to talk to the servers.
Seth said: "Does turning off the viewing of sidechains help with the speed?
We had started a feature where segments near the mouse would show up as they do now, and ones further away would be lines (not exactly wireframe). Would that be useful? We can try to finish that up and release it."
You know what, that sounds like a great feature…but to answer your question, no, turning off the viewing of sidechains doesn't help with this particular problem.
Turning off the side chains used to speed things up a little, but right now it hardly matters if I view every bond and sidechain or if I only view the naked backbone, the speed is lacking in both cases.
And it's not just the speed of folding, it also takes at least twice as much time to open the solutions for example, also trying to do anything else on my computer when foldit is running is hardly possible.
Like it was said before, this isn't general chat about asking for a way to speed up foldit as far as I'm concerned…it worked fine, and then something changed which made it not run fine. Any ideas?
hmmmmm, something changed today…….
not back to normal, but definitely not as bad as it's been.
If anyone did anything, then thanks.
If no-one did anything, I guess my medication kicked in :P
I'm also using a Win system, and foldit also seems to take up <50% of processor power.
I heard a really interesting suggestion from themarquis: What if there were an option to turn graphics off completely? When one is running a long recipe, one really doesn't need to look at the protein at all. I also assume turning off graphics would also speed up processing power quite a bit.
grafics are done, as the name says, by the graphics processor. The CPU should not have much to do with it.
We're continuing to work on performance. In the meantime, the new Developer Preview update has two features that may help:
Minimize the app on Windows stops rendering. So it should use less CPU when minimized.
There is a "line" render style (ctrl+shft+L), that should improve rendering speed when used.
This might have something to do with Linux's spotty OpenGL support. My ATI driver 'broke' when I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04. ATI stopped supporting the proprietary driver, and Ubuntu switched to the open-source 'radeon' driver without 3D acceleration, falling back on MESA's software implementation of OpenGL – which actually looks better! But slow.
I hadn't used FoldIt until a few days ago. It works fine on that machine under Ubuntu 9.10 (it's a dual-core 2.3ghz AMD64 with a low-end ATI 1250X integrated graphics). Even works OK on my 1.6ghz Atom netbook - but it's a bit slow for the real puzzles :)