Monday, May 14, 2007

PokerAce Tip

I like Full Tilt, but their software has always caused some people problems, especially since an upgrade a few of months ago to include resizable tables.

This upgrade seems to have caused some players who use PokerAce HUD to experience lag if they open too many tables. If I open more than two tables at a time and have PT and PokerAce running, Full Tilt will slow to a crawl. Card animation is difficult to see, and sometimes I can't click the check, fold or raise buttons for several seconds while my computer thinks about it.

Maybe my computer is getting old (3 years), but it's still a problem that was created by a Full Tilt upgrade. The PokerAce programmer said it's nothing that he can fix.

So here are a couple of things you can do to moderately reduce lag on Full Tilt if you have this problem:

_ Turn off "Flicker Free Drawing" in PokerAce's preferences.

_ Set PokerAce to low priority in Windows Task Manger. Do this by pressing Control-Alt-Delete once, and then selecting the "Processes" tab in Task Manager. There should be two instances of "PAHud.exe." Right click on each of them, select "Set Priority" and then choose "Low." It helps a little.

In the long term, I think the solution will be for Full Tilt to either work on a software solution, or for me to buy a nice new computer. Maybe at the end of the year.

4 comments:

Hammer Player a.k.a Hoyazo said...

Hey Gnome, I went and got Poker Tracker and PA HUD this weekend on your and woolf's recommendation, but I'm having trouble getting them to work. Maybe you can stop by my blog today and let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks!
Hoy

ps I worship Chick-Fil-A. No exaggeration, it's my favorite food on the earth.

Wes said...

My computer is fairly fast and new and I have the same problem with Full Tilt just grinding to a halt. On 2+2 there was a tip a while ago that if you don't open your cashier at any point during your session that the full tilt software will not lag, but I don't play that often on tilt so I am not sure if that helps out too much.

easyE said...

I have this same problem. With me, running PAHUD with Full Tilt was virtually unusable. But I have found the following helps greatly:
- surprisingly it is much quicker when I set "Flicker Free Drawing" to on. When I have this unchecked, it seems that the screen is forever redrawing, and this takes up a lot of resources. I know it's supposed to work better with this set to off, but on my PC it is SIGNIFICANTLY faster with this set on.
- running a freeware app called "Process Tamer", which you can get at http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html You mentioned setting priorities for applications in the Windows Task Manager. Well this app let's you set rules and additional settings so that this is automatically taken care of each time FT and PAHUD are run. I've found that my system works well when I set an explicit rule so that Full Tilt is "Forced Realtime" and Poker Tracker is "Forced Below Normal". I actually don't change the settings for PAHUD.

Running it this way makes FT, PT and PAHUD very usable.

Give these a try, you might find it helps.

easyE said...

It seems the url that I posted for Process Tamer doesn't show correctly. Try this one: http://tinyurl.com/mdhnp