Bitcoin Forum

Just as the title said, is there anyway to mine in the background without penalty while gaming? like giving priority to other programs or de-prioritizing the miner? I assume if there is a way that it will mine slower but that is fine

Try using -f 60 argument with your poclbm.
May be even more - like -f 120 and so on.

"-f 120" works for me.  Once, while mining and gaming, my video card crapped out completely and the monitors turned off.  I had to hard reboot.  This may simply be instability on my end, but it's something to be aware of -- don't push your hardware too hard.

What exactly does that do? its seems to be working well, both the 60 and the 120, does it limit the mining speed?

It does, but not by much. My speculation is -f regulates the interval of time for which GPU processes single unit of work, much like a quantum of time in Windows task manager. Or, rather, it specifies a frequency with which GPU changes context. Again - it's only my speculation.

-f 120 does lower hash rate, not by too much when not gaming, but once the GPU is in use, it will drop it significantly... Try playing metro 2033 and you'll see what I mean.

On high fps games, enable vsync

Quick question. If I set -f to something like "1" or "5" does the system become super sluggish and nearly unusable?

Also to note people when you're <edit> remotely </edit> logged into your windows machine (RDP) the video drivers are disconnected so you get maximum performance :)

I don't understand your second part...

a low -f makes everything appear slower etc. So yes it makes it sluggish. but somewhat usable still. -f 10 is web browsing usable IMO

Thanks..I will use -f 10 when I don't intend to do anything intensive with the machine.

Umm well the second part was referring to RDP'ing into a windows machine..ie remote desktop. It seems I swallowed some words. I meat to add int he word "remotely" after "you're"

Using the normal RDP you cant access any of your videocard specific functions. Try to use VNC.

ummm...

No.

Well I know for sure that OpenCL fails because the video card is technically "turned off" (at least the drivers) when RDP is being used. Thus poclm and other GPU miners do not work. So yeah in that case VNC is the way to go. I do not like VNC though cause I find it much slower than RDP.

In regard to RDP and video drivers..read this:

"Terminal Services both on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP include a
driver that acts as the video driver within the TS user sessions. This
means that the local video hardware on the server is not used. All
graphical output created inside the TS user sessions is directed through
the RDP video driver, which converts the GDI calls into an RDP video
stream being forwarded to the network driver. As a result the quality of
video hardware on the Win2003-based or XP-based Terminal Server does not
directly affect graphics performance of TS user sessions"

@ Jaime Frontero

RDP takes over and masks the existing system video drivers, so you do not have access to video card functions normally handled by the drivers. Tools that access the video card at a low levels (ie bypassing the drivers) will still be able to read info from the card..ie tools like GPU-Z and such, temp monitors, etc.

Having a look around few weeks ago i found some "business" related RDP allowing to use OpenCL and CUDA, but i did not dig dipper. Real VNC is reasonably fast.

Hmmm, if you can find out more I'd be interested to know. Yeah some VNC client/servers can be quite snappy if you install some special drivers. I think UltraVNC is one such example. When I last tried it the installer asked me to install some special driver which supposedly improves performance, but I chickened out as I don't like third party apps injecting "special video" drivers into my system. I ended up installing TightVNC instead which does not install anything special beyond the basic VNC server/client combo.

Wasn't there an addition for Win7 SP1 that allows you to run full Aero effects with remote sessions? Could be a counter to this problem of the videocard being turned off. Then again, it could just be a more effective remote session driver.

Which videocard, Radeon 69xx? You shouldn't do much anything while mining, it will lock up if gpgpu apps are running while anything accesses the video overlay. Could be the game did just that. But even Youtube is enough to trigger it. Really really annoying.

"You cannot run Aero through a client without Aero capabilities"

Is what someone said on another forum. So I think what is happening here is the CLIENT is the one that renders the Aero effects which I guess is how X11 works :)

In regard to the GPU locking, I've had that happen with YouTube but that was caused by a bug in flash. Actually I think it was the GPU acceleration. I since turned that off. Try updating your catalyst drivers to the latest and also update Flash. Oh and you may wish to turn GPU acceleration off too. I dunno.

You're saying you get hard system lockups when doing anything GPU related while also mining?

I don't remember where it was. The real vnc drivers are used only when the vnc session is on, i never had any problem.