This is undeniably convenient but it made no measurable difference to the performance of our test PC which was built on an MSI DKA790GX motherboard with a Phenom X4 9850 processor and 2GB of 1066MHz DDR 2, all running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. We understand that the Fusion utility will also run on Windows XP.
3DMark06 Results - CPU at 2.5GHz
Longer bars are better
If you fancy a more aggressive approach, you can switch to Advanced mode and then select either the Advanced profile, which works in much the same way as Basic mode except it shuts down a longer list of applications, such as Cryptographic Services. These modes may cause some concern as Fusion will, for instance, shut down your firewall however you can edit any of the profiles to dictate how it works.
Advanced mode
When you finish a gaming session you click the Fusion button to restart all of your software with the minimum of fuss.
3DMark06 Results - CPU overclocked to 3GHz
Longer bars are better
The third mode is Expert and this is where things get interesting as Fusion runs AMD Boost and also kicks AMD OverDrive, ATI Catalyst Auto-Tune and Hard Drive Acceleration into life. Despite the dramatic capitalisation, Hard Drive Acceleration is nothing more than hard drive cacheing, which is an option in System properties.
COMMENTS
Yawn
No x64 support. You'd think that onsidering the majority of their desktop CPU's are now x64 they could at least manage that.
FAIL!
Yet another biased report
HI, AMD still rocks! Yes you need a Phenom, ATI Chipset board AM2+ board. The 780G or 790GX with Hybrid Crossfire. Why would AMD write it for Intel??? Does Intel write software for AMD? NO!!!!!!
Nothing new here...
Ken Salter's FSAutoStart was doing the single click shutdown/restore of extraneous processes years ago.
And as Steven Knox pointed out, it makes little difference on a top spec machine. But it makes a big difference on a slow, memory limited, PC when running a big game...
Promoting something with an epic fail...
I agree that this would only be useful in trying to tweak a marginal system to reach an acceptable performance level - but in the context of Vista's resource requirement, I'd be very surprised if it were any help at all.
Switching back to XP, on the other hand, would bring tangible improvements in performance.
