Lucky Kitty
Member
I downloaded Farmscapes from Game Giveaway o/t Day a while ago and have been enjoying it. Recently I've started to receive warning alerts from Norton about excessive CPU usage and the game has been slow to load, though it seems to play all right once it gets started.
Nothing else has changed on my computer, and I have plenty of free memory.
Has anyone else had this happen. Is there something I could/should do about it?
Thanks for any suggestions. Best, LuckyKitty
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
Open up task manager (Ctrl Alt Delete) and then the processes tab. You can see how much RAM and CPU usage is being used by Farmscapes. I found it to be around 266 000 Kb which is ten times higer than other arcade games that I checked, though the graphics for that particular game were much better than the games I checked. Keep an eye on the memory usage and see if it rises as you continue to play. If it does it may mean there's a memory leak, which is usually due to poor programming. You can see CPU usage by clicking on the network tab. See what the performance is prior to starting the game then again while it is running; (without closing Task Manager)., you can then see the difference when you play the game.
I've never had a problem playing the game, but then I have 16GB of RAM on this particular computer, so rarely get problems related to lack of memory and my cpu has four 3.4GHz cores so again usually no problems.
Norton is notorious for giving warning. I'd ignore the warnings and continue to play the game.
Lucky Kitty
Member
While Farmscapes is running, CPU usage is between 10-18%, Memory at about 1.96GB. Right now, with only Firefox open, CPU usage is 2% with 1.68 Memory. The computer Hard Drive has 264GB Used Space with 317GB Free. The game is actually on an external hard drive - 330GB Used/134GB Free. I have been playing this game a few times a week since I got it. The "Warnings" have only cropped up recently. I dismiss them and can continue to play. I just don't understand why they started occurring.
(Hope you're feeling better WR)
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
The memory usage is basically similar to the figures I quoted above. It does seem unusually high for an arcade game, but then as I mentioned before it is quite a graphically intensive game. Some of my AAA games use as much memory when running, so the seemingly high figure is probably usual for this game. CPU usage also seems okay.
Try running programs like Game booster. Not sure whether it's free now. They did announce that they were going commercial recently, but whether it was the end of May or June I can't remember. There are alternatives but I've forgotten the name of the software. :(
Lucky Kitty
Member
Thanks, guys. Much appreciated.
(I'm Vista, not XP, but thanks anyway.)
mikiem2
Moderator
If it helps, on the Processes tab in Task Mgr. you should see a breakdown of the CPU & RAM usage by process/app. Look to see what processes/apps are taking CPU while the game's running. Could be your AV software is examining/monitoring game files while the game's running, perhaps even taking up the majority of CPU resources -- it would make sense if the higher resource use happened at the same time your AV software decided the game might be malware. If so you might turn off real-time scanning/monitoring *temporarily*, or better, see if there was a way to exclude the game from the AV app.
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