Seti Screensaver Freezes

Questions and Answers : Windows : Seti Screensaver Freezes
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Profile Mark Peters
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Message 718785 - Posted: 26 Feb 2008, 23:03:51 UTC - in response to Message 718542.  

There can be many reasons for this.

First and foremost, this happens on a lot of Vista machines due to the fact that every time an app launches, Vista immediately records all sorts of data or it's SuperFetch caching algorithm which speeds the loading of frequently used programs by attempting to pre-cache them in RAM before each use. These services all happen in the background but can affect things like a loading screen saver.

Similar things can happen on Windows XP with background services causing the screen saver to "stutter" (appearing to freeze every now and then, but then resuming its effect).

Another possibility would be your graphics card. If you're using onboard graphics or an older graphics board, it can take a few moments to load the textures into video RAM (especially true with onboard graphics).

It can also be affected by your video card's OpenGL wrapper. If it was poorly written into the video driver, any OpenGL graphics will suffer (such as the SETI@Home OpenGL screen saver) performance-wise.


This issue happens on my AMD Athlon X2 6400+ system that is currently using onboard graphics running Vista. I know its a combination of SuperFetch and the slower onboard graphics that cause the apparent "freezing".



Thanks for the info. It must be caused by vista like you said. I'm not running onboard video or an old card but rather two 8800gts 640mb cards in SLI.


Cool nice cards...:) Only have one of those, but have one PCIe slot over, if I could bring up that kind of money. Cheers dude!
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Message 718542 - Posted: 26 Feb 2008, 2:23:17 UTC - in response to Message 718316.  
Last modified: 26 Feb 2008, 2:24:12 UTC

There can be many reasons for this.

First and foremost, this happens on a lot of Vista machines due to the fact that every time an app launches, Vista immediately records all sorts of data or it's SuperFetch caching algorithm which speeds the loading of frequently used programs by attempting to pre-cache them in RAM before each use. These services all happen in the background but can affect things like a loading screen saver.

Similar things can happen on Windows XP with background services causing the screen saver to "stutter" (appearing to freeze every now and then, but then resuming its effect).

Another possibility would be your graphics card. If you're using onboard graphics or an older graphics board, it can take a few moments to load the textures into video RAM (especially true with onboard graphics).

It can also be affected by your video card's OpenGL wrapper. If it was poorly written into the video driver, any OpenGL graphics will suffer (such as the SETI@Home OpenGL screen saver) performance-wise.


This issue happens on my AMD Athlon X2 6400+ system that is currently using onboard graphics running Vista. I know its a combination of SuperFetch and the slower onboard graphics that cause the apparent "freezing".



Thanks for the info. It must be caused by vista like you said. I'm not running onboard video or an old card but rather two 8800gts 640mb cards in SLI.
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Message 718467 - Posted: 25 Feb 2008, 22:17:43 UTC - in response to Message 718316.  

There can be many reasons for this.

First and foremost, this happens on a lot of Vista machines due to the fact that every time an app launches, Vista immediately records all sorts of data or it's SuperFetch caching algorithm which speeds the loading of frequently used programs by attempting to pre-cache them in RAM before each use. These services all happen in the background but can affect things like a loading screen saver.

Similar things can happen on Windows XP with background services causing the screen saver to "stutter" (appearing to freeze every now and then, but then resuming its effect).

Another possibility would be your graphics card. If you're using onboard graphics or an older graphics board, it can take a few moments to load the textures into video RAM (especially true with onboard graphics).

It can also be affected by your video card's OpenGL wrapper. If it was poorly written into the video driver, any OpenGL graphics will suffer (such as the SETI@Home OpenGL screen saver) performance-wise.


This issue happens on my AMD Athlon X2 6400+ system that is currently using onboard graphics running Vista. I know its a combination of SuperFetch and the slower onboard graphics that cause the apparent "freezing".


Agree with Ozzfan. Have the similar problem in Vista, but run with a Nvidia 8800GT with enough memory onboard. I think this can be resolved with a good driver upload or the next SP1 within Vista. For now we have to do with this bug.
In the earlier years/days we all had some issues with a OpenGL driver, but was resolved with patches and fixes for the video drivers.
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Message 718316 - Posted: 25 Feb 2008, 12:42:11 UTC

There can be many reasons for this.

First and foremost, this happens on a lot of Vista machines due to the fact that every time an app launches, Vista immediately records all sorts of data or it's SuperFetch caching algorithm which speeds the loading of frequently used programs by attempting to pre-cache them in RAM before each use. These services all happen in the background but can affect things like a loading screen saver.

Similar things can happen on Windows XP with background services causing the screen saver to "stutter" (appearing to freeze every now and then, but then resuming its effect).

Another possibility would be your graphics card. If you're using onboard graphics or an older graphics board, it can take a few moments to load the textures into video RAM (especially true with onboard graphics).

It can also be affected by your video card's OpenGL wrapper. If it was poorly written into the video driver, any OpenGL graphics will suffer (such as the SETI@Home OpenGL screen saver) performance-wise.


This issue happens on my AMD Athlon X2 6400+ system that is currently using onboard graphics running Vista. I know its a combination of SuperFetch and the slower onboard graphics that cause the apparent "freezing".
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Message 718102 - Posted: 25 Feb 2008, 2:49:37 UTC

Hello all.

I've noticed that the seti screen saver often freezes on my primary pc runnning windows vista. Boinc continues to do work but the graphics of the screen saver do not move. Eventually, it comes out of it and starts moving again. My computer responds just fine during these "issues" proven by simply moving my mouse and the screen saver closes. Anyone have any ideas why this is happening? Thanks!
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Questions and Answers : Windows : Seti Screensaver Freezes


 
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