Command line - do these work and are there others?

[user1679]

A long time ago in the 3.x version of the game, I found a post somewhere that mentioned using the following command line
switches to improve performance on Windows:

x4.exe -nocputhrottle -malloc=system -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -sm4

-nocputhrottle - keep the game running at max cpu /fps when in the background
-malloc=system - allow the system to handle memory allocation instead of whatever implementation x4 uses
-USEALLAVAILABLECORES - is supposed to force the game to use all cores instead of just one**
-sm4 - use shader model 4 (I think the game defaults to sm5?) which may work better on some GPU

I think the sm4/3/5 option works because I noticed worse graphics with sm3, particularly with shadows. Do these actually work or am I
just seeing coincidence? Are there any other command line switches that adjust performance?


** Usually the OS handles the assignment of cores and unless x4 was written for parallel processing, I don't see how forcing it to use multiple cores
would be an improvement. I know you can set the program's affinity (manually and through code) but that doesn't mean it's going to always run
on all cores.

[CBJ]

Of the command line parameters you have listed, only -nocputhrottle is actually even read by the game. Enabling this option will make the game run faster when in the background, but at the obvious cost of potentially stealing performance from whatever application is running in the foreground. That's why it's not enabled by default.

For reasons that should be pretty obvious, we don't hide performance improvements behind command line parameters. In general, command line parameters will switch features or optimisations OFF, for testing and debugging purposes.

[user1679]

Of the command line parameters you have listed, only -nocputhrottle is actually even read by the game. Enabling this option will make the game run faster when in the background, but at the obvious cost of potentially stealing performance from whatever application is running in the foreground. That's why it's not enabled by default.

For reasons that should be pretty obvious, we don't hide performance improvements behind command line parameters. In general, command line parameters will switch features or optimisations OFF, for testing and debugging purposes.

Thanks, I thought this was the case (though my imagination tells me sm4 is smoother than sm5 ). I've written apps myself and as you said, used command line for debugging which was never compiled into the release version.