Rainmeter adversely affecting game performance

[ArcheKruz]

I noticed that ever since I installed rainmeter, the framerate of most of my games have been cut in half or even worse. Any reason why it would do that?

[jsmorley]

I would certainly not run Rainmeter in the background while playing FPS intensive games like COD or Crysis or something. I suspect it is sending GDI+ calls to update the meters on the screen even while you are running a game in ActiveX. I use Game Booster to shut off not only Rainmeter, but other things that I run which can impact getting maximum performance while playing hard core games. I mean, even though they don't impact graphics as such, why have things like DropBox or EverNote or SpeedFan or UltraMon running and taking memory and / or CPU while I am trying to get the edge on some loser in Black Ops?

I'm not particularly recommending Game Booster as such, it just works for me. You can also just exit Rainmeter or create a batch file to run your game that exits Rainmeter then starts your game.

If you are playing Angry Birds, it doesn't matter. If you are trying to wring every ounce of performance out of your system in a game where performance counts, I recommend giving the game as much of the resources as you can.

[ArcheKruz]

What I noticed is that CPU useage while gaming with rainmeter is throttled down to just 16% or something. Which is pretty interesting considering.

[santa_ryan]

Well, it would be nice if rainmeter would disable all active skins if a fullscreen program is running and then reenable them if the fullscreen app closes

[maminscris]

or you could add under every skin in your rainmeter.ini file

Group=Hide

[Drives&Folders\AnotherCPU]
Active=1
WindowX=1200
WindowY=944
AlphaValue=255
FadeDuration=250
ClickThrough=0
Draggable=1
HideOnMouseOver=0
SavePosition=1
SnapEdges=1
KeepOnScreen=1
AutoSelectScreen=0
AlwaysOnTop=0
Group=Hide

and then create a skin a image skin like

[HideSkins]
Meter=IMAGE
W=3
H=1004
SolidColor=0,0,0,80
ToolTipText=Click to hide | Mouse Over to unhide
LeftMouseUpAction=!Execute [!RainmeterHideGroup Hide]
MouseOverAction=!Execute [!RainmeterShowGroup Hide]

mine stay on the right side of the screen and hides an shows skins

[wreck]

I'm wondering if this is something that could be improved by the Rainmeter developers. I have a fast enough system with 9GB of RAM so a few background utilities have never adversely affected my gaming experience in such a way that I notice.

However, I found that any CPU monitor using RainMeter caused a visible pause in my games every time the meter was updated. At 1/second it was very annoying and having it much slower than that makes it un-useful. In fact since discovering this I found that a Rainmeter clock I use also causes a pause in my games every 60 seconds when it updates.

I have used Windows Gadgets and other native code utilities for clocks and CPU monitoring and never witnessed this kind of system degrading issue. Only Rainmeter seems to have such a visible and profound effect, and unfortunately it appears to be any Rainmeter utility that does regular updating no matter how trivial.

If there is a way for the devs to address this in the Rainmeter design it would be best for all of us. Having to shut down Rainmeter for a gaming session is enough of a problem to warrant using something else, although I prefer the simplicity and expandability of Rainmeter.

[Chewtoy]

I'm wondering if this is something that could be improved by the Rainmeter developers. I have a fast enough system with 9GB of RAM so a few background utilities have never adversely affected my gaming experience in such a way that I notice.

However, I found that any CPU monitor using RainMeter caused a visible pause in my games every time the meter was updated. At 1/second it was very annoying and having it much slower than that makes it un-useful. In fact since discovering this I found that a Rainmeter clock I use also causes a pause in my games every 60 seconds when it updates.

I have used Windows Gadgets and other native code utilities for clocks and CPU monitoring and never witnessed this kind of system degrading issue. Only Rainmeter seems to have such a visible and profound effect, and unfortunately it appears to be any Rainmeter utility that does regular updating no matter how trivial.

If there is a way for the devs to address this in the Rainmeter design it would be best for all of us. Having to shut down Rainmeter for a gaming session is enough of a problem to warrant using something else, although I prefer the simplicity and expandability of Rainmeter.

Hmm... That's rather odd. Never experienced anything like that.
Would you mind posting your system specs and what games this happens in?
Also, are you running any kind of AV that scans Rainmeter every minute/update or something like that? If you got an AV I recommend you set Rainmeter and it's folders as an exception.
After doing that, post you specs and games that this happens in and we'll hope for the best. :)

[wreck]

Sorry I took so long to get back. After experiencing this with every game I stopped using Rainmeter, which is a shame because other than this problem I like the program. I'm currently using some Windows Gadgets to get the meters I want as those don't give me the problems that Rainmeter has.

System Specs:

CPU: Intel Dual Core 2 i7 920 @2.67 GHz (no overclock)
RAM: 9.00 GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
GPU: GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM
Monitors: Dual Dell 2007 Screens
Disk: 2 Terrabyte SATA 3.0GB/s

Windows Performance Index is 7.4 on this system.

So the system specs should be sufficient to overcome any utility running in the background

I have Microsoft Security Essentials which is scheduled to do a scan of the system once per day. So that isn't causing this issue.

Again, by simply not using Rainmeter the problem goes away. And as I said before with a CPU meter set to update 1/second I see a graphics glitch once a second. If I set it to once every 5 seconds it happens every 5 seconds. If I just have a Rainmeter clock that is set to update every minute I see the glitches once a minute. So it is definitely Rainmeter.

WoW is the first game I noticed the problem with, it is very noticible there, but it happens elsewhere as well. WoW runs around 95-100 FPS under normal circumstances on my system.

I'll be glad to provide more information to help the Developers of Rainmeter figure out what is causing the problem.