Significant Performance Mod

[apeek 191]

Greetings everyone! Although largely unnoticed, I withdrew from the community upon the passing of my little brother in March of '16. Just prior, I discovered a secret of the software installation that could potentially benefit any style player and even help ensure the game's continued viability. However, that knowledge might have been disclosed or perhaps even documented since then. So, I must ascertain if there is any demand for the following procedure, confirmed working on Windows 7 through the recent release of Windows 10 requiring minimal freeware and no special skills:

How to make SC4D utilize the discrete graphics adapter in your laptop for a significant performance boost.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

37 minutes ago, apeek said:

How to make SC4D utilize the discrete graphics adapter

We've been discussing that since at least 2009:

How to configure SC4 to work with your new hardware

  Edited May 18, 2018 by jeffryfisher  
linky

[apeek 191]

All modern processors include fused within them a separate logical Graphics Processing Unit, not to be confused with the Central Processing Unit. It is optimized for power savings and usually the first one listed under Display Adapters in Device Manager. High-end laptops and many desktops also include a third-party display adapter engineered to efficiently handle the intense demand of modern 3D games and apps at the expense of higher energy consumption. Windows determines which of the two is most appropriate at runtime primarily by whether or not the program implements DirectX 9 or higher. Unfortunately, since SC4 uses DirectX 7, the faster card is never activated. Instead, it and other older games are forced to rely upon the slower, power-saving chip for all graphical computations. Even if explicitly instructed to utilize the high performance adapter through the driver's control panel, Windows does not honor the setting. Many have concluded there is no way around this limitation in modern PCs... until now.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

9 hours ago, apeek said:

Windows determines which of the two is most appropriate at runtime...

Unless your BIOS can be configured to turn off the on-board GPU when it detects a card. In that case, Windows never sees the lesser GPU.

[apeek 191]

That would be a great feature indeed, but would negate the advantage of have two display adapters.

[APSMS 1,892]

On my laptop with a separate nVidia card, I simply use the nvidia control panel to force the computer to use the graphics card. Most of the time it auto-selects the nvidia card anyways but every so often it decides to use the internal GPU so I simply changed the settings to remove the option.

For most users with a dedicated card, I suspect that the motherboard isn't piping any graphics rendering done by the CPU to the GPU, since in order to use the GPU's power you have to connect the display through the card, so either your card is being used to render everything or it's not being used at all. The bigger problem is getting SC4 to run properly after being loaded onto a high-speed card (which is really every graphics card nowadays, no matter how terrible), which is addressed in Jeffry's linked thread above.

[apeek 191]

If the game really does utilize your nVidia card without any special workarounds, that's fantastic! However, it is easy to mistake. Fortunately, I don't experience any unwanted anomalies during game play or otherwise. Persuading Windows 10 to engage my performance adapter for SC4 was a hard won battle. So, I was eager to share the knowledge. However, I gather that is not the case en mass. Thank-you for your feedback.