No, nearly all commercial games don't use CPU if they don't need it. Just for example i could happily play Ufo: Aftershock (modern 3d tactical game) with max settings, but Civil War Generals 2 (an OLD 2d wargame) uses so much CPU that it overheats in a few minutes... talk of optimizing! Besides using more CPU power than you need is just useless.

I'm saying it overheats because Asus Probe thinks 70°C deserves getting my attention with loud beeps

I can see that you didn't read my post very throughly and that you didn't understand the point I was trying to give. Each application/game should only use what it needs. If you use up all CPU-time "for the hell of it" you are practicing bad software engineering.

Why not apply the same philosophy to the required hard disk space? Most games these days take up 600-700 MB, so even if you are not using it you could store some large trash files along with your game, so that you are not wasting less resources than other games.

Give one single reason for why you want to use up all CPU-time even though you don't need to? Except that you as the programmer is lazy and/or use libraries which won't allow you to be nice to the system.

Kent:

There is a problem here in that giving the OS back some time could result in your game missing a frame or more because the OS doesn't return back to your game in time. I think the OS processes in Windows only have something like a 10 ms resolution.

The best bet is to provide options to run with or without resting.

Yeah this is the only reason. If you have tried this, does the game skip a frame or two once in a while? And does it matter?

Absolutely!

Well that is not always the case. When you reach a certain treshold it makes no sense anymore to break down for example unit movements into smaller movements per logic update and a higher rate of logic updates. There will always be a point when it makes no sense anymore to consume all available CPU-time.

The "new way" of programming is waste resources all you want to, because great hardware is common and relatively cheap these days. I'm not an advocate of this style.

It's nice of you to not take up all the system resources! Do you see any difference at all in game quality except for the FPS number? (And if so, you could have it as an option as Richard suggests.)

The resting is supposed to free up system resources while waiting to do the next logic/frame update. That is, if you finish and have lots of time left until the next cycle you wait some more than 1.

I myself only run Linux at the moment so I can't try it. By the looks of the screenshot earlier in this thread it seems nice. Are you inspired by the Alien Breed games for the Amiga? (If not, check them out using WinUAE - they are great)

A program should use 100% CPU power if it needs it. If it needs 1% and does 99% busy waiting, then that's bad.
Aside from battery life in laptops (which IMHO don't make sense for playing games on anyway), desktop machines drawing as little power as they can is a good thing in a world where people try to safe power.

Yeah, but I'm not sure how to do that in OL.

I will agree that it's friendly to use less than 100% of the CPU when possible, to allow for energy conservation, greater battery life, better multitasking, but calling an app 'broken' because it uses 100% CPU is simply incorrect. If the computer breaks down under these conditions, the hardware configuration is entirely to blame. So, sure, put in two lines of rest-when-idle, put in your other optimizations and your 'low quality graphics' mode, but there will almost certainly still be some PC that will need to use 100% to run your game, and that is not something you should lose sleep over.

One could certainly construct a world with background, physics-driven effects which could be scaled up to take more processor time than any currently-feasible processor could possibly provide. So unless you mean this in a very abstract, 'assuming we had a machine that was ~infinitely fast' sort of way, um, I don't know how you come to this conclusion?

Er. What? There's surely nothing wrong with trading off performance for ease of development, when one has analyzed the significance of the gains and losses involved.

Sure and if it's part of the game then use 100% CPU-time. Just do not use it without spending it on something which adds to the game quality.

Well in some cases it is, and this is one of them. Remember that we are talking about a game using up 100% of the available CPU-time without needing it. I'm not saying that we should all do some kind of pre-mature optimization, just not be lazy in situations like this one. That laziness is what I meant by "new way".

Not a good idea. It starts jumping periodically on my PC when I turn out shadows (the only way I can get over 200 FPS). I think that rest(1) unconditionally is the best way to go, especially since it doesn't slow the game down at all.

Yeah, I know. It's because I'm calculating each ray of light, and it just works drastically slower if I make it any more smooth.

Can you say "bloodshed"?
{"name":"589813","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/e\/2e0382fc122e8e39ad835713d0cee8a7.jpg","w":377,"h":333,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/e\/2e0382fc122e8e39ad835713d0cee8a7"}
No shadows this time so that you can see the whole scene.