from Hacker News

The return of the turbo button

by d1stc on 11/7/21, 6:31 PM with 53 comments

  • by ryandrake on 11/7/21, 11:51 PM

    > performance-hungry programs (read: games) sometimes have to check the spec of the PC they're installed on and tell the poor punter that their PC isn't fast enough.

    This seems like the root problem. Developers, please don't do this. Just let the user run the software, and if it's not fast enough for them, it will be self evident. Don't insert your own personal judgment about what kind of PC is "good enough" and if you absolutely feel you have to butt in like that, don't make the logic faulty like these games apparently do.

    When I buy a game, I expect to run it. If my PC is too slow, it will run slowly and I'll be motivated to upgrade or fiddle with the graphics settings. Trying to be this performance police is like saying "Your PC is pathetic. In lieu of letting you run this software you paid for, please accept this picture of my middle finger instead." I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that treats me like that.

  • by jraph on 11/7/21, 7:48 PM

    Today's turbo button which does what it says (speed things up) is the two last buttons of uBlock Origin's first toolbar… which block web fonts and javascript. The fastest code is the one that is not downloaded and run.

  • by rawling on 11/7/21, 7:37 PM

    > Which is a problem if the hapless app finds a shiny new 12th-gen processor that looks like a bunch of Atom-class cores – it complains that this new-fastest-ever-chip isn't quick enough.

    From the article I assumed this was different from the DRM issue, but it links to the exact same Intel KB article.

  • by the8472 on 11/7/21, 8:53 PM

    I sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost (for AMD) to get constant clock rates when doing wall-time benchmarks. Sure, instruction counts would be more accurate but not everything has perf-counters built into it for measurements. I should hotkey that to have a turbo button too.

  • by chungy on 11/7/21, 10:58 PM

    > it's repurposing something you already have but never use: your Scroll Lock key.

    You can tell the author doesn't use Excel :)

  • by karmakaze on 11/8/21, 12:59 AM

    Terrible post. It's nothing like the turbo button. This iteration is based on aggressive DRM that gets it wrong. Maybe having different game threads on one or the other type of core might matter but that's not what the current problem is.

  • by themitigating on 11/7/21, 8:08 PM

    Slightly off topic but Porsche came out with an EV and the top trim is called "Turbo S" which lines up with their other gas car naming.

    Some people got upset because it doesn't have a turbocharger in it and felt it was wrong to use the word in the name.

    Because of turbo buttons on PCs when i was growing up, turbo buttons on 3rd party console controllers, and many other experiences i always associated with just fast, not a specific car part.

  • by MauranKilom on 11/7/21, 7:53 PM

    TL;DR: Games may look at the efficiency cores of new hybrid Intel CPUs and determine the CPU is too slow to run the game. Intel fix: If enabled in the firmware, you can disable those cores (leaving only the beefy ones) by pushing scroll lock.

    (Disclaimer: No fact checking was performed on my end).

  • by Animats on 11/8/21, 4:56 AM

    There's a whole series of annoying problems which come from this mix of fast and slow CPUs. I want to put the refresh thread on a fast CPU, the asset loading threads on slow CPUs, and the network update thread on something in between. How do I tell the OS that?

    A problem right now is asking how much memory the GPU has. The NVidia driver for Linux will spill data out to main memory if the GPU memory fills up, but you take about a 50% performance hit when this happens. It's better to cut down distant detail and stay in fast GPU memory. But it's hard to find out how much GPU memory is available and how much a spill costs. With "onboard graphics", as in laptops, there may not be any dedicated GPU memory, so this isn't even a meaningful question.

  • by raunometsa on 11/7/21, 7:42 PM

    I never knew what the button did on my old computer. I tried to push it for more speed, but never worked!

  • by judge2020 on 11/8/21, 12:23 AM

    Slightly related, I think it would be useful to be able to force your program onto p-cores if it uses AVX512, as that is noticeably absent on e-cores.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core...

  • by wmf on 11/8/21, 12:39 AM

  • by butz on 11/7/21, 11:26 PM

    Today's turbo button is "power savings" mode.

  • by foxes on 11/7/21, 11:23 PM

    Lol why can’t the program/OS just handle this automatically. Is Apple that far ahead? You need to manually press a button? Windows moment.