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Subject: Re: Engine knps and video card question

Author: David Dory

Date: 02:33:13 01/16/02

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On January 15, 2002 at 16:31:44, John Hatcher wrote:

>I just installed a new video card and, quite unexpectedly, I found that all my
>chess engines (using the Fritz interface) are reporting significantly higher
>knps during analysis - in the range of 50% faster knps.
>
>The video upgrade was a modest one - from onboard INTEL AGP (8mb shared) to a
>ATI Xpert 128 (16mb).  The computer is a 333mhz Celeron with 294MB memory.
>
>Does this make any sense?  How does upgrading video increase knps of a chess
>engine?  Does it?
>
>Thanks: JOHN

*** Every single time *** your program writes something to the screen, be it a
clock (second) change, a nps rating, or anything at all, it slows your program
down. The slower your video card, the more it slows it down (in my limited
testing, anyway).

A few years back a friend with a slow computer came to me complaining of his
latest little game's bad performance. Sure enough, he'd decided to include a
timer for every single task in the game. (So you wound up with 4 - 5 timers all
running simultaneously)

You wouldn't believe the (negative) impact such things as timers & nps counters
have on CPU intensive programs.

Dave




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