Author: Thomas Mayer
Date: 14:46:33 01/22/06
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Hi Joseph, in fact there is a little difference between how chessbase native engines are handled and uci-engines are handled. But this is not the fault of chessbase, it's simply windows. You know, usually Windows is set to prefer foreground application. Natives are part of the GUI, so in fact they are the foreground application. UCI-engines instead are loaded as a seperated .exe and became background applications. Therefor when running with ponder=on on a single CPU system the native will get more CPU time (I believe a lot people have reported that already). That's why a ponder=on match with chessbase GUI on a single CPU between a native engine and anything else does not make sense at all. It should work fine with native against native or e.g. UCI against UCI. But when ponder is off it should not have any (or very less) influence. On a Dual it might happen that the thread for the GUI steals a bit CPU power more from the UCI engine then from the native one (with ponder=on), but again the influence should be very low (less then 10 Elo I would say). There might be other things which harm non-native engines, but a) I am very sure this is by accident and will be solved when discovered and b) I doubt that the influence is big. You know, somehow ChessBase isn't too happy with the multi-engine talents of their GUI -> about less then 1% of the users are interested in it, but it produces more then 50% of the support questions. There were rumours that they might stop to support this. (Or only hidden -> they need also a way to test their engines... :) Greets, Thomas P.S.: Vincent has a bit different view about that topic, you might dig around a bit in the archives, I think at least some of his points seem to be right - wether they are by accident or not might everybody decide himself.
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