Question CPUCores and Speed0 on Steam

[igor_kavinski]

CPUCores :: Maximize Your FPS on Steam (steampowered.com)
Speed0 on Steam (steampowered.com)

Anyone here used these? Speed0 seems super interesting. How is it speeding up cinematics?

 

[Borealis7]

i don't know how these work, but speaking as a software developer i can theorize why i personally wouldn't use these because i don't believe they work.
lets look at the 2 main components that are responsible for performance - CPU and GPU.
On the CPU side, can these apps increase your CPU performance? do they overclock your CPU? do they optimize the C++ runtime command translation done by the OS? i highly doubt it on both accounts. and if they do push your CPU in some way, it could potentially crash your system.
If all they do is tie the process to certain cores, the performance uplift would be negligible.

on the GPU side - same argument for overclocking, or perhaps these apps intervene in the rendering pipeline to disable certain features in order to increase performance? that could potentially degrade the image quality. either way, i really doubt these apps can optimize graphics drivers better than the companies that actually make them, and know the hardware in and out.

all this leads me to believe (and that is the key word here) that these things are probably just a waste of CPU cycles, cannot improve performance without hurting image quality (which you can simply do by lowering your settings), or even flat out malwares, spying and telemetry apps.

 

[igor_kavinski]

all this leads me to believe (and that is the key word here) that these things are probably just a waste of CPU cycles, cannot improve performance without hurting image quality (which you can simply do by lowering your settings), or even flat out malwares, spying and telemetry apps.

What about Speed0? It seems to be increasing playback speed of cinematics. Is it interacting with the DirectShow API?

 

[TheELF]

i don't know how these work, but speaking as a software developer i can theorize why i personally wouldn't use these because i don't believe they work.
lets look at the 2 main components that are responsible for performance - CPU and GPU.
On the CPU side, can these apps increase your CPU performance? do they overclock your CPU? do they optimize the C++ runtime command translation done by the OS? i highly doubt it on both accounts. and if they do push your CPU in some way, it could potentially crash your system.
If all they do is tie the process to certain cores, the performance uplift would be negligible.

Well
1. they can put all other processes to a low priority so your game doesn't get any slowdown from background tasks.
2. If there are any known issues with games that are fixed by changing priority they can apply those.
The performance uplift wouldn't be great but it would also be better than negligible.

Is it worth it? Debatable.

What about Speed0? It seems to be increasing playback speed of cinematics. Is it interacting with the DirectShow API?

Retroarch just implemented something like that for emulators.
I don't know if they use the same method but this is at least one way of doing it.

RetroArch 1.10.1 release! – Libretro

There is now a more energy-efficient way to fastforward. Instead of relying on the CPU to be as fast as it can be to fastforward frames (the default and only way up until now), now it’s also possible to fastforward based on ‘frame skipping’. To be more precise, this method of frame skipping is done by measuring the frame time and skipping based on frame time.
Some advantages to this new way of fastforwarding:

• GPU MHz stay down, which is more energy efficient than presenting frames that are not visible anyway
• Fast-forwarding with 3rd party frame limiting such as scanline sync is possible

It also means that with this option, fastforwarding is now possible for more cores on lower-end hardware. For instance, in the past, if you wanted to fastforward by x 2 in a specific game, the CPU of your machine had to actually be able to run the game with the core twice as fsat as the normal default.

 

[igor_kavinski]

There is now a more energy-efficient way to fastforward.

That is probably referring to fast-forwarding the rendered frames of the emulated game whereas Speed0 only increases the frame rate of the cinematics in the game.