With Icrontic’s mention of Rogue – the free in-game web browser, I got excited and decided to give it a shot.  I’ve been wanting an in-game solution to web browsing for a long time.  I’ve felt that one of the best ways to improve Steam gaming would be to allow web browsing through their community in-game overlay.  I was anxious to see if Rogue answered my call.

I did some quick and dirty performance benchmarks with Rogue to see if it effects that precious performance that PC gamers hold in such high regard.  My test system has the following specs:

Gigabyte GA-965P ATX Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.4 ghz
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX
3 Gigabytes DDR2 800 RAM
250 Gigabyte SATA Seagate HDD

To test performance I used Flatout 2, a chaotic racing game by Bugbear Entertainment.  It came out in 2006, and it doesn’t have outstanding graphics.  I chose the game because it loads very quickly and my system has no problem running it at an unfaltering 60 FPS.  I ran FRAPS to show the frame rate of the game in the top left corner of the screen.

I took 4 screen captures – Two during gameplay without Rogue running and two during gameplay with Rogue running.  On the right side of the screen capture you can see the game running with the frame rate in the top left corner in yellow.  On the left side you can see Windows Task Manager showing either active processes or performance monitor.  Lets see the results:

Flatout 2 without Rogue running

As you can see from the FRAPS overlay the frame rate is locked in at 60.  It didn’t dip below that number once.  Only 50% of the CPU is being utilized, which makes sense since it’s a dual core processor and the game isn’t multithreaded.  Flatout 2 is using a little over 300 megabytes of RAM.  Now lets restart the game with Rogue running.

Flatout 2 with Rogue running

Flatout 2 / With Rogue - Performance monitor

Flatout 2 / With Rogue - Processes

I loaded icrontic.com as I played to make sure the browser was passing information.  The results were less than impressive. As you can see from the Performance monitor screen capture my CPU usage was now up to maximum.  Page file usage had increased slightly, which is to be expected.  But the headliner to take note of is the in-game frame rate.  Where I was previously running the game at a constant 60 FPS, I now was struggling to break 30.  I found this to be interesting as Rogue was only using 60 megabytes of RAM (only is a rather big word for performance enthusiasts however).

To see if I could change performance based on the Rogue window size, I quit the game and maximized Rogue.  It became very clear to me that the actual Rogue window size heavily impacted its in-game performance.  I was unable to even get to a race with Rogue maximized, the intro videos were playing THAT slowly.

Upon the second launch with Rogue running, I actually had trouble getting the overlay to work.  I had to restart my PC AND relaunch the game seven times before it worked correctly.  Before I tried Flatout 2 I used Oblivion.  Rogue crashed that game three times in a row.

Rogue is a great idea.  It’s the type of application that gamers are crying out for now that integrated communication systems have been implemented in most games.  Unfortunately to the PC gamer every frame per second counts, and when an application is effectively cutting your numbers in half, most gamers will find its use unacceptable.  Here’s to hoping this performance kink is worked out soon, this is a still a technology that most of us really want.