FF7 using 100% CPU help

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hello everyone,

im running FF7 with mods on windows 7 with a pentium 4 2.8 ghz processor and a Nvidia geforce 8400 gs.

I would assume that i should be able to run FF7 while also running other programs but when i run FF7 it uses 100% cpu when i check it in task manager.
 
Also when i try to run another program it lags FF7.

any ideas why this is, is my cpu not powerful enough?

any help will be greatly appreciated!!!
 
If I recall correctly, this can be fixed by setting it to only use a single core.
 
yes i read that post about ff8 and using one core.

But i only have 1 core. its a P4 2.8ghz HT processor.

Ive looked everywhere i could think of online for a solution but couldnt find anything about this problem im having.

FF7 is such an old game, i cant imagine that it would tax my system so much that my processor cant handle running it and another program at the same time.
 
Sorry, I completely missed the part where you said what processor you're using.

Are you using Aali's driver?
 
This is just what the game does. It assumes people use Win98 in which if you DIDN'T use 100% of the processing power in a full-screen app, bad things would happen. This is still more-or-less true, but not of FF7. It doesn't require all it locks. Indeed, it WILL try to lock an entire processor core for its dedicated use. There might be a way to prevent that, or at least throttle it, but I haven't investigated it too much.

Frankly, it's not really pushing your processor that hard, but it is counting ticks to determine game time and such. In that way it wants to catch every tick, but it's not really pushing it. Also, don't try to be using processor power while running FF7 (like defragging or installing something) for that reason.

Moral is: don't worry about it. There's probably nothing anyone can do about it without seriously re-writing the timing scripts.
 
Thank you for both of your guys help! I guess it seems i may be out of luck.
 
Or you could ignore the above posts (since they are mostly untrue and generally unhelpful) and just enable vsync.
 
Well I don"t know what vsync is, or what it does but i enabled it and it helped the frame rate.

Thank you for the advice!

Also the other comments got me thinking. I know I have HT technology and I remember setting up affinity before. But since I installed Windows 7 it reset the bios back to factory settings which has HT turned off! I turned it back on, set affinity and priority, and know I got it all working to satisfactory level.
If any one cared to know....
In case you were wondering, the other program I am running is Flash Media Encoder so I can broadcast myself playing FF7 online! I'm just getting my channel set up on justin.tv but feel free to head on over and check it out. Should be pretty cool once I get it all fine tuned and set up. My channel name is oksoyeah
 
Hmm, my own advice is not even that helpful but it will atleast get you something.
Vsync means the game will wait for the screen to update before it starts drawing another frame (roughly). Since FF7 already tries to limit framerate on its own you will get stuck in the busy wait sometimes even with vsync on. But when the timing is right and you dont your CPU will be free to do other things.
 
Is there anyway to force the frame rate to be higher?
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There is, but the game will just run in turbo mode. FF7 was designed to run at those low FPS values, so increasing it won't do any good.
 
How do you go about forcing the framerate to be higher?

I understand that the framerates are supposed to be at certain levels but currently I am not achieving those levels. I'm running at about 12-13 frames in battle which is fine. But so far in the field at 14-17 frames, which is little laggy.  I have yet to go to the world map.
 
You can't force the framerate to stay higher. You can set a maximum value, but not a minimum value.

If the game isn't running full speed for you, then I suspect the Custom Driver is too much for your old P4 to handle.
 
My money is on that graphics card not being powerful enough to do scaling. What resolution are you running in?
 
I have it set to run at 800x600 in windowed mode. Runs fine until I start other apps, which I would like to get it to run while also having multiple apps running at the same time. I've tried everything I can think of to get it to work. After setting affinity and priority it is playable just a little laggy.
 
Change resolution to 640x480 (or 1280x960 if you can) and you will see a massive improvement. Unfortunately thats just how the game works, the only way to make 800x600 glitch-free is very taxing on low-end graphic cards.
 
Alright i'll give it a try and let you know how it goes. Thank you for the help.
 
Great! So far works fantastic! I set the resolution to 640x480 and runs near perfectly now! Also I just decrease my screen size when I play so the games not so small.
 
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