If you've ever experienced a modern game with a jittery framerate or unexplained slowdown, despite using little to no CPU power, this video might be your salvation! :O In today's filler video, Gemini's discussing one of the aspects about Windows none of us put any thought into because of how extremely basic it is, and that's the Scheduler, sometimes called the "System Scheduler" in order to differentiate it from the "Task Scheduler" since they're two completely different things! The Scheduler's job is to determine when processes and threads get CPU power, how much CPU power they get, and is basically the core of the entire multi-tasking nature of Windows. However, because of how the Scheduler works, there's certain steps modern games need to take in order to prevent the Scheduler from interfering with how the game's supposed to function and you might be surprised how many games fail to follow these steps! Fortunately, if a game fails to adjust the Scheduler, users DO have a means to get around problems caused by this, and it's actually really simple to do! :) ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * Windows 11 apparently made a fundamental change to the Scheduler and thus the tricks I relay in this video to improve performance in games which don't handle this correctly may no longer work; Windows 11 now only honours Scheduler resolution changes when a program is in the foreground unless it has been given a special flag allowing it to affect the resolution even in the background. There may be more to it than that, I'm not sure, but if you're on Windows 11 and having trouble getting an old game to run without jittering, this might be why. :| * One thing of note is that timeBeginPeriod() and timeEndPeriod() are often associated with the Windows multimedia timer functions, so it's easy to overlook them as some programmers may think to use these functions also requires using the multimedia timers, and that's simply not the case. You don't have to use the multimedia timers when using these functions to adjust the Scheduler resolution! :) * Yeah, I'm using a VERY old copy of OBS. I do intend to upgrade soon I'm just not sure what to expect and need to make sure I have plenty of time on my hands to test stuff out and configure a newer version. * Getting EarthSiege 2 running on my Windows 10 system actually took some effort. I first needed to download a modernized installer since the original was a 16-bit executable. You can find modernized installers for Sierra titles at this website: http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/NewSierraInstallers.html Once installed, the game pretty much doesn't run without using DxWnd, and then because it's a multi-executable game you have to set up BOTH primary game executables in DxWnd and give them both appropriate settings. DxWnd is VERY useful for getting pre-DX9 games working on modern versions of Windows and can be obtained from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/ * Although the System Scheduler has been around since the Windows 3.x days, it's seen its fair share of design changes. In Windows 3.x, the scheduler is non-preemptive, meaning it has no real "idle" state and that a process which fails to relinquish the CPU at all can end up locking Windows up entirely. Windows 9x/Me started to take the shape of the scheduler used now, but still opted to run 16-bit apps in a non-preemptive mode. Windows NT, 2000, and every Windows OS following use pretty much the same scheduler methodology, with minor tweaks here and there to improve how things are handled! ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html