I couldn't post yesterday from the laptop cause I had it directly connected to the internet and no google group credentials there and such.

Anyway today I am reporting back on my activities and experiments with Star Wars Battlefront 2 on a laptop from 2012.

By modifieing the driver version it is possible to run the game, the menu will play, characters can be looked at though at one character I believe it was the young version of darth vader it will also crash the game.

The main crashes that were tested/examined are when the single player story/campagne is played.

At some point video is played it seems. Some star fighters jump out of hyperspace and approach a ship.

Later inside the ship there is a corridor and a female talking to a male about somebody else.

At this point usually the game crashes without reporting any error, and the amd/ radeon driver seems to crash and restart.

So all is not fine.

I tried everything I could think of:

1. Moving the game to the internal harddisk for more speed during video playback.

2. Disabling hyperthreading by disabling all multi cores in bios, running one core was super slow.

3. Disabling intel boost technology in bios also make it very slow.

Both disabled too slow to test.

4. Setting various forms of affinity in windows task manager.

5. Disabling/moving the qt video codecs to a different folder inside core folder, apperently there are not used and something else is responsible for decoding the videos. Perhaps the graphics driver video codecs ? For now I assume it's a video I am watching but maybe it's real time don't know for sure.

Process Explorer was not available on laptop... that could shine some more light on it. I may try and install it and see if some dlls show up later. But first I wanna try something else Sparky Linux with Linux drivers, cause obviously the problem lies inside the amd/radeon drivers.

6. I also tried different driver versions. One driver version had an HDMI issue and could not play music anymore so that was ****... so that was replaced.

Apperently AMD has two different driver packages available:

Catalyst
and
Crimson

Or something like that.

Crimson can be installed over Catalyst.

Crimson is newer... but beta... and it runs a bit slower.

7. I disabled as many windows services as possible to free up as much as phyiscal memory as possible. Laptop has 6 GB of ram available. The game used up to about 5.4 GB of RAM.

However windows might also require some RAM for kernal and such. Perhaps it's a RAM issue after all and somehow it's not tapping into virtual memory.

Perhaps the game's software was written in such a way that it locks down virtual memory to actual physical pages to prevent paging to disk.

So this might be a virtual memory related crash... maybe inside a driver somewhere where it runs out of memory, not sure about that.

8. I tried making the page file 32 or 24 GB but somehow that caused a freeze up eventually I managed to set a fixed page file to 16 GB.

9. I noticed with Catalyst drivers 15.7.1 and maximum processor speed and maximum memory the video playback would come furthest.

One time I noticed disabling one hyperthread might play it even smoother.

10. I tried playing with a headphone.

11. I tried disabling all audio's via control panel.

12. I tried settings in config files of games.

13. Running windowed and all kinds of window size settings and such, borderless etc.

14. Command line parameters, -novid and such.

Nothing seemed to help, the game kept crashing in the same way.

I am amazed how much hyper-threading helps making a fast computer. Though I also tested with boost technology on.

I know one thing for sure though: "Boost + Hyperthreading" is an absolute MUST to have a speedy laptop... it was an amazing experience.

If Threadripper 3's boost and hyperthreading is at good at intel's it's going to be mega-super-killer of a processor and system.

SO I MUST HAVE IT AT ALL COST LOL... Probably though.

The slighty lower to much lower clock frequency is a bit of a concern.

Threadripper III base 3.7 GHz vs Intel base 5.0 GHz might be somewhat of a concern.

5.0 GHz Seems nice... but I don't quite believe it will be stable. Even if it will be stable... the many threads of threadripper will give the system a much longer life time... + the terrabytes of memory is also going to be very nice.

Anyway

One thing I noticed after all this messing around... the text scrolling in firefox is faded out and looks ****ed... fady... don't like it... messed with clear type... even if it's disabled by setting it up text will still look much better. Highly recommend windows user do this.
Anyway for new I will leave it as it is... the Crimson software does have a advanced looking tray bar menu system with lot's of information in it... don't really like it that much... too much clicking required on these tiles.... but ok... at least some information is there.

Hmm my laptop which is now connected to hdmi to receiver just stop playing music lol... cause it put the screen sleep mode... kinda weird but ok for now.

Did have some file corruption copieing my music to usb harddisk... which I might have yanked out too soon or there is just some corruption there... fortunately it's NTFS so I will have windows fix it later and re-copy the file.

This is a clear case where using network communication might be a better solution to transfer files...

At least I don't have to yank the usb device from the computer's as much and risk file corruption.

For now this is an "entertainment" usb external disk... so I am not so bothered with it for now.

For backup on usb disks I hope write cache will remain disabled for such devices. I think windows recognizes individual drives and keeps settings per device. I hope so but will have to check this in the future sometime to make sure

I look very much forward to giving Sparky Linux Game Over edition a try... and maybe windows 10 enterprise or home edition or something.

Will probably need/require a new usb stick, or maybe I can make some room/partitions on the usb stick for further experimentation... would be very nice to have windows 10 and linux on the same usb stick to have some options available for booting and experimenting.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.