Win: If you want to reduce Deadlock CPU use...

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Belix
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Win: If you want to reduce Deadlock CPU use...

Post by Belix »

This is probably not an issue for anyone here, but since I have a solution for it, I thought I would share anyway. Like many other old Windows games, Deadlock (the first one, at least) will use as much of one CPU core as possible. There are a number of possible reasons someone might wish to address this extra CPU usage, such as increased fan noise, excess heat, and unnecessary hardware stress.

I've been playing quite a few such games lately, and decided to look for a global solution. I found exactly what I was looking for in a program with the least descriptive name ever: Battle Encoder Shirase (I believe the author is from Japan). The program is pretty easy to use and works fine on Windows 7. You can use it to reduce the total amount of CPU one or more running processes can use, and it remembers which processes you've used it on before, moving them to the top of the list so you can find them later when you want to limit them again. With it, I have been able to reduce CPU usage of these old processor hogging games by anywhere from about 40-70% on average. It requires a little tuning to find a good maximum percentage and sleep/awake cycle time, but a few tabs between the target application and BES will get you there, as the values you input take effect immediately without having to apply/close the control window. For my processor, -45% and 30ms worked well. If your settings aren't good, you may notice audio skipping or slow game performance.

Of note, if you run Deadlock in compatibility mode, it may be running with elevated privileges, in which case it won't show up in the list of processes BES can see. To adjust Deadlock's CPU usage in this situation, you must run BES as an administrator. Then Deadlock will appear in the process list and can be controlled.

You can obtain Battle Encoder Shirase from here, just look down the page a little for 'Current Version' and the download link should be immediately below.

http://mion.faireal.net/BES/#download

For me, it has been great for keeping fan noise at a minimum, but as an added bonus it keeps temperatures about 10c cooler on average with various old games.
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