david00214 wrote:Ragnar Dan wrote:david00214: One thing I did that you might want to experiment with if the new driver doesn't solve everything is lowering the priority of your VMware process to BelowNormal after it starts running the SMP client. That helped my GPU client somewhat.
I forget, what's your setup and operating system? I'm running Vista 64. With an 8800GTS in my system I can run two SMP clients and one GPU2 client and they all perform at their max potential. When I upgraded to a GTX280 I noticed the SMP clients really interfere with it. Now I run one SMP client and one GPU2 client. Would be nice if I could get both SMPs running, but, admittedly, those things are so buggy nowadays I don't really feel like even running them anymore.
I'm using XP-32, but the fact that VMware doesn't need as much priority as it normally would get would seem unchanged from XP-32 to Vista-64. It definitely helps speed things up, UI-wise, when also running the GPU client, for me. If Windows had a greater number of priority levels, things would work more smoothly, methinks.
Now that I've updated to the 180.84 driver, I don't notice any change, though. Of course, I already made changes to account for various things, so maybe undoing those would show the difference... which I'll eventually test. Probably.
When I had a Vista-64 system and ran a 9800 GT with it, that thing didn't perform particularly well. Turns out I should have looked for a different model since the one I got (for $97.75 during Newegg's 1-day 15% discount with another discount code and before the $20 MIR I also hope to get) only has a 1600 MHz shader. I OC'ed it a bit, but it only made it about +9% or something like that. Anyway, I also couldn't figure out a way to make the client run w/o putting the client in the Startup folder without hacking something up, and since it was a computer for someone else I didn't want to do that.