Aero slowing down peformance?

[mojothehut]

Hey all.
So I've been having windows pop up while I minimize a game, telling me that due to slow performance it's switching to windows basic theme.
Not sure how it could be running slow. I have a fairly decent gaming rig, AMD 975 @ 4.0ghz, 16gb DDR1600, AMD 7950...

Usually when I'm playing an MMO full screen, I'll tab out a few times to chat, read stuff. Kind of ADD-ish like that :awe:
Just getting sick of these warnings from windows talking about slow performance wanting to change color theme.
Is that just some odd windows bug?
It's win7 pro fully updated

 

[imaheadcase]

Yah its just some games don't work well with Aero. its not slowing down performance, its just quirky like that. I got a few games that do that as well. Most don't have a problem.

I'm guessing it has something to do with just memory management making windows think it needs aero to run when game is minimized.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I have had the same message as well. Stangely I see it more with my new system than an older, much weaker system I used before. It is annoying, but meaningless I think. Even more strangely, it seems like the game is running fine when I see this message. I have tried a few benchmarks with Aero on or off and have never seen a difference. I have a 1gb HD7770, and wonder if I might be running out of video memory when this happens.

 

[BrightCandle]

Everyone sees it, its a stupid bit of Microsoft coding that means it keeps prompting you with daft messages. I don't know of a way to fix it other than moving to Windows 8.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

Everyone sees it, its a stupid bit of Microsoft coding that means it keeps prompting you with daft messages. I don't know of a way to fix it other than moving to Windows 8.

Hear hear! One of the things I like best about Windows 8 is that it ditches Aero. Aero seemed pretty cool back when Vista came out, but it feels pretty dated now. Add to that the problems like the one OP is experiencing, and it just had to go.

 

[bystander36]

There are some games which give me this warning. Crysis 1 was one of them, at least back in the day before 2Gb cards. I don't know if it still does.

Anyways, to make it easy to turn Aero off, I found a nice batch script which you can toggle on and off Aero in a second. I then put it in an extended toolbar on my taskbar, so I just click it once to turn it off and again to turn it back on.

@echo off
sc interrogate uxsms | find "1062"
if %errorlevel%==0 goto :sc_start
sc stop uxsms
exit

:sc_start
sc start uxsms
exit


(place that in a file with the extension .bat)

 

[taq8ojh]

Hey all.
So I've been having windows pop up while I minimize a game, telling me that due to slow performance it's switching to windows basic theme.
Not sure how it could be running slow. I have a fairly decent gaming rig, AMD 975 @ 4.0ghz, 16gb DDR1600, AMD 7950...

Usually when I'm playing an MMO full screen, I'll tab out a few times to chat, read stuff. Kind of ADD-ish like that :awe:
Just getting sick of these warnings from windows talking about slow performance wanting to change color theme.
Is that just some odd windows bug?
It's win7 pro fully updated

I do get those messages as well. I believe the cause is graphic card running out of memory, which Aero needs, so it MIGHT not be a bug of any kind, and rather unfortunate way things work.
The only "solution" would be to get a card that has ton of memory, and playing games that can't use all of it.
I might be wrong, though.

What pisses me off the most about it is I can't get Windows to remember the setting I always choose, don't change anything and don't remind me again. That is a bug, I believe.

 

[mojothehut]

Well my 7950 has 3gb of video memory, and i never see more than 1.5gb being used (games such as crysis 3, etc)

 

[MrK6]

Increase your pagefile size, it'll fix it.

 

[2is]

Everyone sees it, its a stupid bit of Microsoft coding that means it keeps prompting you with daft messages. I don't know of a way to fix it other than moving to Windows 8.

Easily fixed by simply right clicking on the executable, properties, compatibility tab, and select the option to disable desktop composition. This will disable aero whenever the game is launched (and re enable when you exit) and keep the message from popping up.

 

[imagoon]

This normally happens when a game or something like older versions hook the video card drivers. It isn't so much performance as the game / app is blocking the 3D calls from Aero to the graphics stack via an exclusive device lock.

Also Aero > the butt ugly Windows 8 interface. Windows 8 looks too much like Windows 2.0.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

This normally happens when a game or something like older versions hook the video card drivers. It isn't so much performance as the game / app is blocking the 3D calls from Aero to the graphics stack via an exclusive device lock.

Also Aero > the butt ugly Windows 8 interface. Windows 8 looks too much like Windows 2.0.

I'm not a huge fan of the metro UI aesthetics, but I think Win8 looks beautiful on the desktop. Hard to argue with taste though.

 

[rgallant]

Easily fixed by simply right clicking on the executable, properties, compatibility tab, and select the option to disable desktop composition. This will disable aero whenever the game is launched (and re enable when you exit) and keep the message from popping up.

that's the way I do it
-had to do that for stalker cop + mod so i could run sli ,so I do it for all games now just to rule it out for any sli hic ups.

 

[imagoon]

I'm not a huge fan of the metro UI aesthetics, but I think Win8 looks beautiful on the desktop. Hard to argue with taste though.

Yup. Opinions are opinions.

 

[mojothehut]

Increase your pagefile size, it'll fix it.

Call me chicken, but I was always under the assumption that it's best not to mess with page file size?

 

[Deders]

Usually one of the first things I do after installing windows is set the pagefile to a static amount to avoid fragmentation. So long as you don't switch it off altogether you should be fine, but I'm not convinced it will solve the problem.

I still get messages like that occasionally but only when the game is using a lot of CPU or GPU. I usually ignore them. The only thing it would really affect is the video memory footprint it takes up, you can save 50-80MB by disabling it which made Battlefield 3 smoother on my old 1GB 560TI

To do this I simply create 2 text files, type "net start Themes" into one and "net stop Themes" into the other (no quotation marks) Change the extensions to .bat, use the stop one to turn themes off completely, and the start one to switch it back on again.

I think disabling themes altogether saves more video ram than just disabling Aero.

 

[Cerb]

Nothing to do with the page file. It's specifically a popup about turning Aero off for better performance, even though there's plenty of system and video RAM free (more than the game can address), and performance has been perfectly fine. Just Windows being Windows, especially as it only happens after alt-tabbing a few times. Either tell it no, or turn off Aero for the game.

 

[hackerballs]

I agree Cerb.............if you have enough RAM...(8g or more)..turn your page file off for increased performance.......don't even know why they still have it today with all the RAM that everyone has......could have come up with something better by now...lazy MS

don't be

Mojothehut........................"Call me chicken, but I was always under the assumption that it's best not to mess with page file size?".............it's OK

 

[Deders]

Windows still needs the pagefile for certain tasks, It has been proven that switching it off actually decreases performance.

 

[Cerb]

I do have mine off, and no, it hasn't been proven to decrease performance ("certain tasks" = minidump on BSOD, BTW), but rather, that the OP's popups are unrelated to it. I think a few responders were thinking the OP was getting low virtual memory warnings.

I got the same popups playing Deus Ex w/ the DX10 renderer, and only after alt-tabbing to/from a web browser (which is also using the GPU for some of its work, which I think was related, since it didn't do it when alt-tabbing to/from FB2K or Explorer). Plenty of free VRAM, plenty of free system RAM (over 4GB cached, pretty consistently), and no performance issues at all. The popup is specifically recommending the disabling of Aero (switch to basic) to fix some non-existent slow performance. Of course I can't get it to do it now, when I want it to show, or I'd take a screenshot and post it. My guess would be that some internal timers are being tripped as it swaps between the full-screen program and the desktop.

 

[taq8ojh]

I agree Cerb.............if you have enough RAM...(8g or more)..turn your page file off for increased performance.......don't even know why they still have it today with all the RAM that everyone has......could have come up with something better by now...lazy MS

don't be

Mojothehut........................"Call me chicken, but I was always under the assumption that it's best not to mess with page file size?".............it's OK

You have just taken the "three commas to end every pseudosentence" to whole new level.
Also, you repeat the same idiocy about pagefile people like a robot. In fact, you also take that to new level with the performance part of that claim.

 

[Deders]

I do have mine off, and no, it hasn't been proven to decrease performance ("certain tasks" = minidump on BSOD, BTW), but rather, that the OP's popups are unrelated to it. I think a few responders were thinking the OP was getting low virtual memory warnings.

Not got time to find it right now but I've got an article somewhere in a magazine where they benchmarked Disk performance amongst other things and proved in 3 operating systems that disabling it did in fact decrease performance.

Edit, It also must use it for more than crash minidumps, I've got plenty of ram in my system and monitor pagefile usage amongst other things, In win 7 I've never seen it empty, even when I tried 8GB. Right now there is no need for Windows to use the pagefile due to lack of memory, there is over 1.25GB spare (got a game loaded) but it's paged 266MB out to the disk.

 

[Cerb]

Not got time to find it right now but I've got an article somewhere in a magazine where they benchmarked Disk performance amongst other things and proved in 3 operating systems that disabling it did in fact decrease performance.

Did they include tests that involved maximum service times? They pretty much never do, though that's basically the reason to disable the PF--that Windows disk IO tends to block everything. Did they include peak commits of their tests? If higher than RAM, having a PF would be faster, by quite a margin. If near RAM, the PF case could be slightly faster in bandwidth-type testing, due to paging out. Any fair benchmarking for disabling the PF needs to be done using more RAM than will be committed. If not, or if that can't be reasonably assured, the PF shouldn't be disabled, for reasons of correctness, rather than merely performance. Due to that, a fixed-size PF is really pointless, as well, unless you want to have a PF just big enough for a dump.

If you're not aware of your commit, leave it alone. System-managed size has no magic tricks, but it will make it bigger if needed, and size PF access is highly random anyway, the fuss about PF fragmentation is just . The, "if you have X GB, then..." advice is bad, because the need (or not) depends on factors which vary by user, and memory that needs to be used always increases (oh, and um...I just skipped over the weird-formatted above post, there, the first time around). But, it's not magic, either, and cheap RAM makes turning it off a pretty viable option. Whenever I get around to upgrading, FI, unless RAM goes up another 70% or so, I will, for the first time ever, not even be able to spend more on RAM than CPU (32GB under $300...crazy times), and won't have any good way to use even half of it. If you're not able or willing to take the effort to figure out with some certainty if you can run w/o a PF, don't try, and don't set a fixed-size PF, especially a small one.

Edit for edit:

Edit, It also must use it for more than crash minidumps, I've got plenty of ram in my system and monitor pagefile usage amongst other things, In win 7 I've never seen it empty, even when I tried 8GB. Right now there is no need for Windows to use the pagefile due to lack of memory, there is over 1.25GB spare (got a game loaded) but it's paged 266MB out to the disk.

It preemptively writes to the PF, in case it needs some of that memory. But, it will not go pull it back in preemptively, if tons of RAM gets freed, instead waiting until those pages are needed. Much of the PF's activity makes sense for netbooks and older computers, but use some major heuristic changes, these days, with cheap and plentiful RAM being common, rather than a resources to be conserved at all costs (likewise, with HDDs seeking as slowly as ever, increasing read-ahead by a few times wouldn't hurt, either--IIRC, they haven't change that since around XP). MS may have put many hours into it all, but they've done so assuming that RAM is expensive, when blocking IO time is much more, "expensive," these days. They used to change how they treated demand IO and the PF, to adapt to changes in hardware and use, but haven't seemed to try any such things for a 7+ years, now.

 

[Deders]

Interesting stuff

They did surmise that having the page file on a 2nd disk was preferable as it frees up the main disk for windows I/O but now we have SSD's with long lifespans that can perform multiple I/O's at once It's not so much of an issue at if you have one.

I also have the Disk Queue monitored, that's total for 4 disks and I rarely see the figure change apart from 1 and 0, it says the maximum it's had in the past day is 43 but that could be because I was testing a faulty disk that was making my machine lock up when it got to bad sectors, usually the highest is 1 or 0 now I have an SSD.

 

[mikeymikec]

Usually aero (desktop composition, the graphics hardware accelerated bit) is disabled when the user runs a game. For old games I tend to switch off desktop composition in the shortcut's compatibility settings just to play on the safe side.