Sunday, July 17, 2011

What's the deal with AMD & UT99?

I just finished playing a few games on the temporary laptop server & was disappointed with the results.  It was herky-jerky in a lot of places, especially near walls and doors.

It was never like that even way back in the day when BOT House was running on a K6 (basically a hot shit 80486 processor—AMD's answer to the Pentium line), except when EXP IV was running on a dual core AMD64 and the OS itself was 64bit.  Setting the processor affinity for the different UT99 instances seemed to fix that problem.

Well, the laptop is a dual core AMD64, and the processor affinities are still there (I tried shutting them off with no improvement in play), but the OS is 32bit.  So... WTF'ingF?

Luckily the laptop is a short term band-aid.  Yesterday I ordered an El-Cheapo refurbed IBM P4 desktop to replace it.  No more or less powerful than the one BOT House was running on, or the box that replaced it.  If play goes back to normal, it will make me think twice about buying another AMD box in the future.

The box that was EXP V seems to be happy being BOT House and it plays very well.  I still have no clue what the issue was with the old BH.  There was no problem with the CPU's or the power supply's cooling fans (well, they were spinning), so that seems to rule out Heat Death, but at this point I don't feel compelled to do a complete autopsy on the damned thing.  Just let it rest in peace next to its fallen comrades in the basement boneyard.

So anyway EXP V et. al. will be back on Intel hardware by this weekend.

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