12 months of trying to resolve SLI - time to turn to square enix

[Syx]

Crystal Tools is a nice graphics engine hampered by an ancient graphics API. Time and time again I place the blame for poor performance on DX9.

Three-way 4k display is about 26,000,000 pixels. You need about 2.4GB/s of bandwidth to push 30 frames of RGB444 data to your monitor without any sort of compression or optimization. There are no hardware bottlenecks you can find in your system. There is a software bottleneck that is resolved by tricking Windows into viewing the directory as newly created. The problem did not exist until Windows 8 was updated to Windows 8.1. Is it the "Windows 8.1 Update" or pre-Update 8.1? It might be worth investigating Windows Updates for 8 that made changes to core components of the operating system. That you have to change the directory name every time you boot the game gives me the feeling that it's a prefetching or superfetching or some sort of OS caching that might be misbehaving with DX9. askwoody.com is a good resource for information regarding patches pushed through Windows Update and their effects on the operating system.

What about processes running during the poor performance? Another good tool to use for analysis would be Process Explorer. It will allow you to view the properties of a process and get very detailed information about its resource usage.

One last analytical tool would be Resource Monitor. In the CPU tab of Resource Monitor, you can right click on a process and view the Wait Chain tree.

If this is truly killing you and you want to go above and beyond to find out what the hell is going on, you can debug the executable using the registry's image file execution option. You'll have to work out the debugger to use on your own.