Thanks for trying to be help but I'm well beyond looking at vsync or monitor settings. The testing I've done has been with 6 different editions of windows and multiple monitors, AMD cards from multiple vendors on multiple motherboards, and I've put nvidia cards in too to test.
The bulk of the problem comes down to the fact that the way NT-based versions of Windows (which includes every release in the last 12 years) work is that for a session multiple users are logged on - your user profile, as well as profiles for the main system profile, network, and service accounts. And since Vista, drivers run in a separate session from your user evnironment entirely, in Session0 (your desktop/applications run in Session1). This is handled like a terminal server / remote desktop connection, and if you poke around even on mobile editions of Windows you'll see it's technically a 'server' deployment. The problem is that this isn't exactly done right and drivers and their buffers aren't separated cleanly, and desktops (which you don't see) for the built-in system accounts are also interacting with drivers. And another problem is that all of these desktops including 'your' basic user desktop are also being handled by a sort of dummy video device and driver called TSDDD, which you cannot disable. The boot environment will hang up if you try to get rid of this, which is called Terminal Services Display Device something-or-the-other but is actually a framebuffer of some sort. Keep in mind that early DirectX moved handling of some input (e.g. cursor) to be accelerated by the video driver and having multiple active display drivers linked to multiple desktops is really a mess.
Believe me I haven't spent 9 months plugging away at this because I don't have the sense to turn Vsync off. Most people, even competitive gamers, don't realize how much the lag and input distortion has increased. I have tested this by running 32-bit XP SP1 and 64-bit Windows 7 on identical hardware (clean installs) and the immediacy of input on XP is just miles better. I think it drives me crazy more than most because I had been a high-ish level competitive gamer for the better part of a decade and I play at very high sensitivity. I currently use 8200dpi and only play against other competitive players. And trust me, the lag and distortion is appreciable. I can certainly tell you that if you know how rip into Windows and tweak around some of the major bugs and redundancies, high grade gaming mice are capable of far more accuracy than most people would believe playing on their standard installs.
On the subject of Ray Adams, it is my understanding that he has not been actively developing for quite some time, and given that almost nothing in the registry in Catalyst 13.X is as it was back when he was still working on Tray Tools, I'd hate to sweat him for information.
This isn't a matter of 'I want MY computer to run better' this is a matter of 'because of my experience with gaming and hardware over the years, I can attest that without a doubt certain things REALLY are not working right as far as Windows is concerned'
If anybody, especially AMD devs, could give me a major break and help me out with giving me a little info on the current configuration of the many Catalyst bits and pieces,I would just be elated. I could put down pages and pages of my testing/observations of all the strange things and a few outright errors I've found in Windows as I've worked on this and all that is up for grabs, all I'm asking for is a tiny bit of documentation.
Again, let me point out that I'm not hunting for problems in the Catalyst drivers, but rather, because of some peculiar things I've found with Windows there may be slightly better ways to configure the drivers that help circumvent the lousy input and video handling present in recent Windows releases. The end result of this, I hope, is a driver configuration/profile aimed at competitive gamers. I've neared the end of what I'm able to do as far as modifying Windows and the input stacks themselves, I'm just trying to make sure that there is minimal lag in the video driver stacks as well, which hasn't been noticed due to there already being so much lag and pollution of the mouse input.
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03/20/2013 06:50 AM
