Bitcoin Forum

Ive got my opencl miner running with the -f 60 flag. But in games it still steals most of the cycles, is it possible somehow to change it so it will be lower priority so the power that isnt being used by the gpu for the game is then used by the miner app? Or atleast some way to stop it hogging it all?
thanks

try -f 120 or even -f 240.

Can someone explain exactly what the "-f" flag does?

It stands for framerate i believe
it will attempt to keep your framerate above the certain number set

I see, thank you!  :-X

is the flag not aggressive at keeping the system running at that framerate? at 60 my games run at 30-40fps.
I'll try as you suggested though, thanks

The flag is definably not a static threshold, your frame rate will go below specified that is why i believe some has suggested to set it to 120 to compensate for this. I don't understand the point of hashing while gaming you could probably get more fun to hash ratio if you just stopped the miner for a short while and then start it back up after your done. That's just me I can't stand games having low frame rates :)

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if you would like to donate Mhash/s I'm offering $20 through paypal/dwolla/bitcoind/namecoind reward to anybody that can find the first block on my server. I've been hashing for a good 24 hours and my GUI miner(OpenCL) is reporting 1% stale/invalid shares. Details can be found here,
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=27400.0

yeah same, cant stand lower than 60fps :p. I was just woundering if i could continue hashing when playing a game since otherwise that power would go wasted. Not many games max my gpus anyway.

Edit:
240 seems to work really well, takes me from 79 fps to 69 which is still perfectly acceptable. In other games that demanded more power i think i need to use higher values still though, guess i'll keep swapping what im using depending on what im doing. thanks for the help.

No problem. You'll still probably hash a lot, even during gaming; most games don't use 100% of the gpu (maybe not even 50%) all the time, unless they are really cutting edge or something. Even then. :)

I think that the problem is that games often render each frames more than once.   For example, Anti-Alias and Anisotropic filtering will draw the screen at least twice before displaying it.   

Personally, I use -f30 for browsing (without flash videos), -f 60 for VLC playback and -f 240 for gaming.   

Even with -f 240, when a game isn't rendering (like in a load screen) my MH/s are close to what I get at -f 30.  If course it goes down with heavy rendering but this is what we want.

As for the games frame rate, it suffers very little with -f 240.   On average, I'd say that I lose about 2% of my FPS but this allows me to maintain from 50% to 100% of the hashing power depending what the game is rendering.

If you underclock your memory, don't forget yo put it back to default values before gaming too.   It affects performance greatly and I would even crash in some games with low memory speed.

-f 240 works nicely for my 6870 and WoW.

maybe i'm just crazy but I just stop my miner when gaming lol.

I would do the same if I didn't forget to start it again when I was done gaming.  Honestly though, even BF:BC2 runs great with -f 60 for me.  *shrug*  I just have a lowly 5850 too.

I have 2 cards and run the second one on phoenix with aggression 14, the first one opencl with -f90

I can run this way 24/7 whether I am gaming or w/e, it seems to give me the best performance all around without having to mess with things.

you can up the f number while gaming but when youre not set to -f 1 or -f 15 or something. your hash rate will thank you.

for my HTPC for instance i run it at f 1 at night (dont care about screen lag), f 30 during the day (so my wife can watch stuff) and its off completely when watching a blu ray rip as I want perfect output.

higher f number = less hash rate. if 24/7 mining it adds up.

Lowly 5850?  Shit, I'd stab someone in the neck for a few of those.