quote:

Originally posted by marco1900:
In these troubled times... came a man bringing the Real Truth.
He said : to deserve CM11, you have to get rid of your old programs and cloths and richness.
You have to present yourself naked in front of CM 11, and, maybe you could run it without freezing your PC.

Every single computer game ever made, from the old days of DOS to today, has run best when no other programs were running in the background. Some old DOS games games HAD to be run with a clean autoexec.bat and config.sys file. The simulation game Falcon 3.0 even came with a special booklet telling players how to create a special boot disc for running the game. If you're only finding this stuff out now you must be pretty new to gaming. Computer games are meant to be played as the only thing running other than the operating system. This is not a secret - it's common knowledge in any community of computer gamers.

Heck, it's not as if programs that run in the background are doing you any favours. It's not just games that they slow down - it's every aspect of your computer's performance. I routinely run msconfig about once a month to see what program some bozo programmer has decided to plug into my computer's startup routine against my wishes. Usually I find a couple each month, and I've never found a single one that I needed to start up when Windows starts, except perhaps for my antivirus software, and I go through periods when even that seems more annoying than it's worth. I simply don't understand why anyone would defend the idea of running a computer with the software equivalent of garbage clogging up its engine.

I'll say it again, if you haven't tried disabling all the programs that are running in the background you simply aren't serious about figuring out why your game won't work properly. I can't help you if you refuse to be part of the solution.

Once again, there is no evidence to suggest that this game has a bug that causes lockups or slowdowns. If there was such a bug we'd all be experiencing it. On the other hand, there's about thirty years of evidence showing that third party programs, running in the background, cause exactly those sorts of issues.

If you want to solve your problem you'll run msconfig. It's as simple as that. If you don't you can keep on whining but eventually people here are going to get tired of it and place you on ignore, as I have now done.

Again, to quote Ubisoft's official FAQ:

quote:

Please follow these suggestions to optimize game engine performance:

1. Make sure you run as few programs as possible while playing Chessmaster. The more background programs you have loaded in Windows, the less processing power your system will have to make moves within the game.

Hi I'm back! I can't help it 'cos I want to tell you guys how I noticed there was something wrong in the background.My fritz 9 always worked perfectly and this time around ,had the same problem as CM X1.Both programs used 100% CPU time...So I disabled one program at the time and noticed that on-guard programs were the culprits!

I am dissapointed however that no Ubisoft officials showed up here..Although I wrote to Ubi customer support, I didn't get any response yet..That's a shame...

Wheather there is a bug or not in CM X1, I can't tell you..I have a bug myself regards to the first update..It tells me that my version is no good..And I bought the thing! I registered on the online site...Anyway...

Good luck to all and verify programs in the background!

quote:

Originally posted by bachjunior:
I am dissapointed however that no Ubisoft officials showed up here..Although I wrote to Ubi customer support, I didn't get any response yet..That's a shame...

I've been on various Ubisoft forums for three years and Ubisoft just don't post to the forums. Their philosophy is that the forums are for players, not developers.

However, I agree that it's unacceptable that a customer support query should go unanswered. It could have something to do with CM11 being developed in Romania, but one would think they would have someone helping customers in the US.

I thought I would check this out. People were talking about how this is a bug carried forward from the previous version, but that's not true. It's even older than that

Chessmaster 9000 had this kind of issue too. The processor would sit at ~100% from the moment you launched the game. That was true on my old PC which went through a number of different processors and main boards and software configs.

Chessmaster GM Edition still has this bug. Like it or not, this is a bug. Anything which requires the user to alter their normal configuration to play a game is a bug.

For info, I've tested this. It's apparent from the main menu screen where "game.exe" gobbles 100% CPU (well, technically it gobbles 25% of my 4 core CPU) and then continues to draw 25% CPU for the duration, except for some brief periods which I can randomly reproduce where it will drop off.

A few things are important to this -

1. It's drawing CPU when it's just displaying the game front menu. There's NO WAY that a menu screen with three options should be drawing 25% of a modern CPU.

2. It draws CPU regardless of what other background programs are or are not running. I've tested on a system running nothing but winxp (fully patched) and graphics/sound drivers.

3. At some points in the program, I've seen it stop drawing on CPU (such as in the learning acadmey) BUT this is not consistent. Anything that's not consistent within the computing world tends to be a bug, because the computing world should be logical and, therefore, reproducable.

4. This CPU drain is NOT related to the chess engine. It's the game.exe that's the issue. I'd expect the king.exe to draw whatever it likes when it's calculating moves (and, indeed, it does so once I start playing past the openings) but I'd not expect the game interface / menus / whatever to have any kind of consistent load.

Honestly, this is the main reason that I gave up on CM 9000. At the time I had a single-core CPU and the game made the rest of the system unresponsive most of the time. The only way around it was to pause it with CTRL+P - which still "works" - but that's hardly helpful. With multi-core at least I can still use the computer. I was pretty disappointed though when I loaded it up to find that this bug still existed.

If this bug only affects certain users, I'd be interested to know which. I've been through different CPU types and manufacturers, but have always used GeForce cards, so maybe ATI card users don't see it.

Still, it seems that we are mostly stuck with it, since these boards aren't responded to by support personnel, and I don't fancy phoning a premium rate telephone number to be told to restart my computer or drop down to 800x600.

quote:

Originally posted by mistohise:
Anything which requires the user to alter their normal configuration to play a game is a bug...

Then every computer game ever made has this bug. If you run certain programs in the background with any game that game will not work properly.

Every game ever made needs to be run with a certain configuration. Usually that means no programs running in the background.

But you don't have to believe me. Go on living your fantasy where any game should run with no problems no matter what junk is running in the background.

I really do not understand why you are being so antagonistic about this. It's clearly a bug, yet you want to make out as though it's a user error. I already told you in my post that I've ran it on a clean startup with the same effects. The background programs make no difference.

Hi mistohise,

People having ATI cards have had also this problem.
I mean the freezing problem, not the 100%CPU problem that anybody can experience, and above all, laptop users.

I studied it 2 years ago, mainly in this forum : (if you can read French)
http://www.jeuxvideo.com/forums/1-9668-943484-1-0-26-0-0.htm

It's a synchronization problem between theKing and game.exe.
A good proof is that if you run theking.exe and game.exe on the same CPU of your
multi-processor, you will probably see a clear improvement.

You can run these two programs on the same CPU by using the task manager, set the affinities on game.exe and uncheck 3 of your 4 CPUs.

I'm not being antagonistic about it - well maybe a little, but you folks are too, and it's really difficult to maintain calm outlook when I get ridiculed for stating a fact that has been a staple of computer gaming for the past 30 years. It makes it a bit hard to take people seriously when they do the equivalent of insisting that the sky is pink, especially when they ridicule the idea that the sky is blue.

If you run a game - any game - with programs running in the background, and if it doesn't work properly, the cause of the problem is most likely user error (because the user has failed to run the game on a clean system). The fact that you don't like that fact, and the fact that you don't want it to be true, doesn't make it false.

The other thing that makes this so frustrating is that clearly some people have removed the programs running in the background and all of a sudden the game works fine for them, yet even so there are some who insist on saying that I'm crazy and sticking to their notion that it can't be a problem of programs running in the background, or that if it is, it's somehow Ubisoft's responsibility to test CM11 with every other program known to man.

The reason that games have to be run on a clean system is that there are so many programs out there that no game would ever get finished if it had to be tested against every other program before it was released. In short, you're demanding that Ubisoft checks CM11 against goodness knows how many software programs - probably tens of millions. Even if Ubisoft did this, they still wouldn't be able to make CM11 work with every program because some programs insist on using the same resources as others. What they would have to do would be to release a list of programs that CM11 wouldn't work with, and this list would be thousands of entries. Then you'd STILL have to switch off the offending programs before running the game.

The other thing that frustrates me is that here I am, trying to help you folks get better performance out of your computers and you're ridiculing me for it. I mean these background programs, which people are so against switching off, are probably completely useless, if not harmful. The developer of such programs puts the program into the computer start-up routine purely to save the user a couple of seconds of startup time when he decides to run it. The rest of the time such background programs actually cause other programs to run much slower. For instance I recently found that running in the background of my computer was Adobe Reader - a program I use about once a week. This thing was loaded every time I switched my computer on - completely unnecessary and just making other stuff run slower. So I switched it off. Now whenever I need Adobe Reader I click on it and it takes maybe half a second longer to start than it did with the thing running in the background, but the rest of my programs, especially the processor-intensive game programs, run better.

Now there are some programs that can be run in the background while playing a game - Windows obviously. Also some of the more popular antivirus programs usually work - because these are programs that almost every user has, so games developers can test against them. But other programs cannot be tested, which is why you have to remove them while playing games.

Like I say, usually such background programs sneak in without the user even knowing about them and usually they are completely useless. Just remove them and enjoy the game. The other programs you use will thank you for it too.

Again, don't take my word for it. If you still think it's a 'bug' read the following links from various websites:

PC911: "Sometimes you will run into the problem where two programs that are installed on your PC conflict with each other and refuse to run at the same time. Or you have a memory leak (a program that uses memory when in use but does not return it after it is done) but are not sure which program is causing it."

PC World: "All sorts of programs run in the background on your PC. Closing unessential ones is sometimes a good idea, because doing so can increase your system's speed and can help keep software installations trouble-free."

ABC ~ All 'Bout Computers: "a lot of these processes that are running all the time are not really necessary and can slow your system way down and rob it of precious "resources". "

AnswersThatWork.com: "we often come across PC problems caused primarily by programs running in the background, programs which in most cases are started automatically when Windows boots up. 65% of computer problems we solve are caused by such programs. Sometimes these programs are useful and need to be there; quite often, however, they are not needed, and in too many cases they cause severe problems"

Houghton-Mifflin: "they startup when the system is started and run virtually unnoticed in the background. While they are running, valuable system resources are used.
Low system resources can cause poor program and system performance and can result in system errors."

"Memory leaks", "slowdowns", "severe problems", "system errors" - all caused not by 'bugs' but by running extraneous programs in the background that are useless and that conflict with the program you want to be running.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Beeryus,

And the reason that your replies are frustrating is because you're not listening to the rest of us. We've already said that it's nothing to do with our background programs, but you still persist.

Again - I've ran this on a clean system with nothing else apart from graphics and sound, and the bug is still there. It's a bug.

Believe me I'd like nothing more than to be able to stop some other random program and have the bug go away, but I can't. I ain't running them.

Still, at the risk of going around in pointless little circles, I'll step out now. There's been some useful advice posted, I think I will try macro's affinity suggestions and see what happens.

I agree thst people have been saying that it isn't background programs (they won't stop saying it), but no one (as far as I was aware) has said that they'd already run msconfig and disabled all the programs running in the background. If they had, why did they keep saying that background programs don't cause problems and that they shouldn't have to change their configuration?

The only people I've seen posting here who HAVE run msconfig and removed background applications have said that the problem went away after they did so.

Now it's always possible that I missed a post - I do have some members placed on ignore (Marco1900 for example), but are you quite sure that ALL background applications have been disabled? If so then fair enough - I was wrong, but I'd hate for you to struggle with this for months only to find out that, hey, it was a program running in the background after all.

Hmmm, an interesting post.

Can it be a bug? I thought a bug was an error in the programming. If this was the case wouldn't we all get the same problem?

My machine is pretty ancient: 1.4GHz Centrino Laptop, 512 MB memory with a Radeon 9000 64MB graphics card. It barely makes the minimum specs but I run Chessmaster XI with no problem. Surely if it was the 100% CPU usage that causes the problem I would be first in line to experience it? And I am running a virus scanner and a firewall and an Anti-spyware simultaneously.

I don't know what the solution is, perhaps beeryus is correct, but I thought I'd share my experience!

Good luck in solving your problem

Beeryus: If I run msconfig and disable all or some, is this a permanent disablement until I go into msconfig and enable again? Seems like that is correct but thought I'd confirm. Also, I'm concerned about disabling when I don't know if a program is really necessary, e.g., "jusched"; "Rundll32audCtrl" or "ccApp" or "nwiz". Sorry for such a uneducated question.

Hi all. Lewiej, you are correct. If you uncheck the checkbox that only disables the program from starting ... it does not delete it. You can run msconfig again and enable all programs very easily by checking the "normal startup" box. Orangeiey69, your assumption about a "bug" is incorrect. There are many different branches withing the CM 11 program. The "bug" might be in one of the smaller side branches that can only be reached with a certain hardware/software configuration. So, unless we all are running CM 11 on the same processor with the same version of Windows with the same video card and audio card ... we aill not all hav eht same problem :-) Mistoehise, what is your configuration so we can see if any others have a similar part of the equation (i.e. visdeo card, audio card, processor, ram, background programs (use task manager to see).

Thanks,
DC

I'm not sure if this will be helpful or not, but it works for me. If you adjourn the game when the memory is maxed out, then reload it, the problem will be solved. (For a little while.)

quote:

Originally posted by drcasa:
Mistoehise, what is your configuration so we can see if any others have a similar part of the equation (i.e. visdeo card, audio card, processor, ram, background programs (use task manager to see).

Thanks,
DC

Currently it's Core2quad Q6600 with 2GB ram on windows XP. BFG Geforce 7950 GTOC. Creative audigy 2zs. Currently just the normal windows processes + avg, but same results with AVG turned off.

quote:

Originally posted by lewiej:
Also, I'm concerned about disabling when I don't know if a program is really necessary...

What Drcasa says is 100% correct. Also, if you disable every single startup item using msconfig it will not disable any programs that are absolutely necessary. WindowsXP re-enables and loads up the absolutely necessary stuff (i.e. the stuff that lets windows run) even if you disable it using msconfig.

I experience the 100% cpu with XI and X. I installed an old copy of Chessmaster 9000 and noticed this problem does not exist, the cpu only spikes when it has to calculate a move.

Went back to CMXI and the problem returns. Even at the start menu, or during a game with pondering off the cpu is constantly at 100%.

If a program uses 100% CPU without doing anything, and the user has no way to stop this or prevent this permanently from within the program itself, it's a BUG, period! And if ubisoft is trying to pass it off as a feature, or is otherwise inclined to do nothing about this BUG, then they're either employing bad programmers who can't fix it, or don't care about charging full price for BUGGY software. And that's all there is to it, really.

Have you not read the earlier responses? Many computer programs run the CPU at 100%. This is not evidence of a bug. The developers have said that CM is SUPPOSED to run the CPU at 100%.

True, the other night, whilst logged on to half a dozen websites, and watching TV in a window, I was also encrypting video for burning to DVD.
Both cores were running at between 97 and 100% whilst creating the DVD, as soon as it was finished, the usage dropped to under 10%