What's the deal-online flash games are so demanding?

[Black Panther]

I'm curious to know what makes these type of games so demanding on the cpu.

Take as an example the facebook farmville, it takes between 35-45% of my Q9450. I just checked it out with fraps, when maximized I get 15-20 fps! That's with Sli 8800M GTX....

Thing is that when I switch off power, the fps remain the same.
In normal games my fps gets halved if I go on battery because the graphics cards down-clock themselves, but not in this case.

I want to kick myself for introducing them to my daughter, I thought her 1.5Ghz single core AMD would have coped with simple online flash games but oh boy weren't we for a disappointment! Her cpu was chugging on fan full speed at 100% Prolly she gets 3-5fps I assume, I haven't checked out yet.

What makes these flash games so demanding? My laptop can play games at 60 fps full detail but am I right into thinking flash games don't utilize gpu power at all but rely only on cpu?

 

[AlienIsGOD]

I am curious too. BP i think its mostly the Zynga games where this issue arises. Cafe World, Farmville, etc all seem to lag my comps even when its the only tab open. I can run Fish Wrangler, Ghost Trapper, and MouseHunt on seperate tabs and i wont notice any slowdown. I think these flash games try to do a bit much for what FB games were designed to do

 

[sneekypeet]

I did a bit of googling on Flash and CPU usage, and alot of the hits lead back to bugs already known in Flash. Not too sure if they really work, but I did run across "fixes" that may or may not help your specific situation.

A few of them mentioned memory leaks as well, do you notice the memory usage is abnormally high when the CPU is "studdering"?

 

[AlienIsGOD]

ive noticed in task manager that mem usage for IE is high at times. Atm my 2 tabs each are about 350K, yet in a flash related game the number doubles (at least!!). This is funny cause WoW take about 700k to 900k of my mem usage.

 

[Black Panther]

High memory usage might certainly an issue...

It's true below I had a total of 3 IE and 2 windows explorer but wth not one game I have uses up that much RAM, whether Sims 3, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, Crysis or Cryostasis...


Btw this is Fishworld, it's not a Zynga game.

 

[PP Mguire]

The game does the processing on your machine instead of their servers to prevent server overload. Youll notice with farmville and especially cafe that they take alot of bandwidth, mem, and cpu.

One thing you can try is downloading Adobes beta 10.1 plugin (it was beta when i last had an Nvidia card) and it does the work on the GPU like folding and other cuda apps. That way there if your daughter has an Nvidia 8000+ GPU it wont use the cpu. Just a theory though.

Me and my dad noticed the flash crap cause his cpu was near maxing and he has a 940BE at 3.8ghz. What i did for him though, was set Firefox affinity to one core and it would max the core but not slow down.

 

[Black Panther]

One thing you can try is downloading Adobes beta 10.1 plugin (it was beta when i last had an Nvidia card) and it does the work on the GPU like folding and other cuda apps. That way there if your daughter has an Nvidia 8000+ GPU it wont use the cpu. Just a theory though.

Me and my dad noticed the flash crap cause his cpu was near maxing and he has a 940BE at 3.8ghz. What i did for him though, was set Firefox affinity to one core and it would max the core but not slow down.

I'm trying it on the laptop, but neither of the above worked. Thanks just the same.

Apparently what's needed is to get the flash utility to use the GPU.
I mean for all powerful CPU one has when it comes to graphics rendering it's like the 3dmark06 and you get a crappy score compared to that rendered by dedicated GPU.

 

[PP Mguire]

True but it isnt rendering graphics. If you set the afinity to just one core it will only use up one core of the cpu but it has to be firefox. So youll still have one core at 100% just it shouldnt use up your whole cpu.

 

[Black Panther]

but it has to be firefox.

Why ff? Will it utilize the gpu then? (I don't think so...)

I tried with IE, set affinity to one core, saw that it worked like that from the Task Manager, but the game still ran at under 20 fps.

(I'm not seeking to make the pc run faster, the game has no impact on other applications I run if I multitask. I just want the game to get higher fps and not stutter and lag lol)

 

[PP Mguire]

Whats your connection speed? Cause it runs fine on my dads pc eith only 1 core going.

 

[syker]

it works on my friend's laptop very well. they have no lag whatsoever, although they are using CPU. it probably has to do with the way they are made. along with the different brands.

 

[Black Panther]

Syker and PP: what CPU's are they?

This is the current speed getting it over wifi on laptop:

What I can say is that such flash games run better on my desktop using E8400 @ 4Ghz (and 8800GT) than using laptop Q9450 @ 2.67 (and sli 8800 GTX)

 

[DirectorC]

I think it has to do with the fact that you're running it inside a platform inside an OS. Look at how slow a lot of big apps coded with Java are. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

 

[newtekie1]

It is because the CPU has to do everything, including render the graphics. Yes, the graphics aren't amazing, but a CPU sucks at rendering graphics.

 

[DirectorC]

Actually, Flash now supports GPU acceleration, and I believe QuakeLive uses it, but it's a little more complicated than that.

 

[newtekie1]

Actually, Flash now supports GPU acceleration, and I believe QuakeLive uses it, but it's a little more complicated than that.

No one is saying it doesn't, but the games in question don't or rather they don't use it.

 

[PP Mguire]

Syker and PP: what CPU's are they?

This is the current speed getting it over wifi on laptop:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/687815583.png

What I can say is that such flash games run better on my desktop using E8400 @ 4Ghz (and 8800GT) than using laptop Q9450 @ 2.67 (and sli 8800 GTX)

My dads using a 940BE which is now running stock. I didnt know he took off my overclock upon flash testing and he sets the afinity to one core and its smooth.

My internet connection is about 1.2mb down but my ping is 9. You dont have a very good connection to your server so my guess is maybe your lagging out like you would playing an online FPS?

It is because the CPU has to do everything, including render the graphics. Yes, the graphics aren't amazing, but a CPU sucks at rendering graphics.

Exactly. The more advanced the flash game, the heavier on the cpu.

Actually, Flash now supports GPU acceleration, and I believe QuakeLive uses it, but it's a little more complicated than that.

She said it didnt work so i think the flash game actually has to be optimized to run on the gpu.

 

[DirectorC]

Yeah it's complicated The article talks about that. Lazy developers are lazy.