why do ie9 and mozilla steal 30 fps?

[realninja]

i go from 25 to 60+ fps when closing all web-browsers .. how can they have that huge impact on framerate ?

 

[Alperce]

Same happens to me, it's amazing, they take away about 10 FPS from my game

 

[Welsh]

when you close your web browser you free up cpu usage for you game

 

[Sgt Jigglebelly]

also something I've noticed with my HD 5870 is that when alt tabbing between game and browser or running in windowed mode, sometimes i think it gets stuck in a 2-D desktop mode (as long as i have firefox open) and doesn't 'try' in the game, thus significantly hurting my framerate - could be whats happening with others in some cases but a pc that is being pushed hard by a game in the first place would probably have a fair amount of frame drop anyways from having a browser open

 

[Airforce]

I think it's actually HW (GPU) acceleration, same thing happens with Adobe Flash, if you run it through GPU, you get huge performance decrease in game while playing flash video in browser, if you disable HW accelration and CPU does the work , everything is smooth.

 

[TheRealGunther]

Ya windows 7/vista is to blame it can use up to 2 g of ram just idling lol. close everything when playing even the steam overlay can have a big impact.
Also this helps alot "Gamebooster" its free and easy to use .It closes all unnecessary programs so you can run games better sometime it will give up to a 40% boost!

[url]http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html[/URL]

 

[|ChaoS|]

Why have anything running in the background when you are in the game???

Blows my mind that people use BOTH, this is the LAST GAME I would EVER want to minimize.

 

[LightsabeR]

why do ie9 and mozilla steal 30 fps?

Because you should be using Chrome.

 

[Moyako]

Ya windows 7/vista is to blame it can use up to 2 g of ram just idling lol. close everything when playing even the steam overlay can have a big impact.
Also this helps alot "Gamebooster" its free and easy to use .It closes all unnecessary programs so you can run games better sometime it will give up to a 40% boost!

[url]http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html[/URL]

lol, gunther. The looked like an ad bot xD

 

[Sufyan]

Browsers are not just a single program idling in a background, they are usually loading lots of extensions (java, flash etc) and constantly using cpu power and bandwidth to check for updates and what not.

 

[Freezy]

the thing is, while watching a youtubevideo online a lot of gfxcards enter a low3D clock profile, for example my HD5770 will clock to 400/900 MHz (gpu/mem). now, if you leave your browser running in the background, the card sometimes fails to set the clocks to their high3D values (875/1200 for my 5770) and stick with the low3D clocks and game performance will suffer greatly.
so, exit your browser before starting the game to make sure your gfxcard will work with full force.

edit: this can also happen by just starting the browser if the hardware acceleration in the browser is turned on. the card will go in the low3D mode and then fail to clock higher while gaming.


note: this can also happen if you open a youtubevideo in the steam overlaybrowser (found out while playing Trine and watching a walkthrough in the overlay, performance dropped. restarted game --> everything fine again)