RemmyX25 wrote:
Don't give us the excuse "OH I HAS LAPTOP WITH 3GB RAM, IT SUX"
I run a laptop with 1gb RAM and I have no problems with Kiai time whatsoever.
Well for one thing, anything above 1G should make zero difference. More ram does not make things faster, it just gives programs more breathing space. If you have less RAM then you require, things chug like crazy, if you have more than you require, it has little benefit beyond just having enough. In my experience, the osu!.exe process typically sits on about 100mb of RAM, which means that this is a non issue.
Bus speeds, GPU fill rates, background services, CPU speeds/cores are the issues, as well as soft sound devices (realtek audio actually consumes CPU to operate, and I obviously need sound to play osu!
). And looking at the fps thread in General, it looks like my laptop doesn't put out the frame rates it ought to (I could blame Nvidia for refusing to support my video card, but my laptop manufacturer (asus) put out ONE driver version when the laptop was produced, and that's *it*, no updates.
I am simply reporting that when kiai time is on, things happen, like slider balls stuttering across the screen, and the initial activation burst can cause the game to freeze for ~40ms which, while this doesn't seem like much, also means that clicks *do not* register during this time, and if I happen to click on a hitcircle during this freeze window, I break my combo, and had kiai time or combo fire (or hell, AVG for that matter), hadn't kicked in at that moment in time, the freeze may not have occured. Now, maybe I can resolve my own issues with computer upgrades, OS re-installs, or voodoo, but that doesn't change the fact that the graphics processing requirements of osu! increase when rendering effects such as combo fires or kiai time.
On an unrelated note, I suspect windows is selectively denying osu!.exe more CPU cycles, until it's processing requirements actually increase (and sustain this increase for a sufficient number of seconds). I notice when I first turn my computer on, and fire up osu, Every single approach circle is stuttering along for about 5-seconds and then it automatically starts going smoothly. SpeedStep maybe?