Fritz 15 seems slow

Apologies to those of you who read this in my blog, but perhaps the forums are a better place for it.

I was a happy user of Deep Fritz 14, with a couple of reservations, and decided when Fritz 15 came out that I would invest my hard-earned wonga in it. After using it, I do get the feeling that I don't have much for my money.

My main gripe with DF14 was with the Database Browser pane, and the fact that there was no way it would show your personally created databases, and even for Chessbase databases it would only show a maximum of 6 databases. My hope was that this had been addressed in Fritz 15, but it hasn't.

The main problem I am having with Fritz 15 is that the engine runs very slowly in comparison to other engines and results in taking a long time to get to the same ply depth during game analysis. My system is a quad-core AMD chip with 8gb of ram and solid state hard drive. The engines compared have been set up with varying amounts of system memory from 128gb to 4096gb for the hash file, and using 4 cores. With no special setup, DF14 and Stockfish 7-64-bit easily attain 3500-4000kN/s. F15 has only ever achieved 1500-2000kN/s, is often only hundreds and has even displayed single figure kN/s???

Does anyone else have any experience with Fritz 15, and can you offer any suggestions as to what the issue is. If somebody from Chessbase were to respond, that would be refreshing, because they are very hard to get any response from, despite my request for information about the Database Browser issue and the slow engine issue. Thanks in advance.

Stockfish still the best i suppose

The noncommunicative nature of the Chessbase company is one of the reasons I stopped buying their products many years ago. That's just my opinion; Clearly they have many customers, so they must be doing something right.

Regarding your problem with the slowness of the Fritz 15 engine. You do know that the F15 engine is just a new version of Rybka, right? In the early days of Rybka, many had the opinion that Rybka underreported the ply depth and node count, so people would have a harder time determining the secret of Rybka's amazing strength. (I would have no problem with Vasik doing this for competitive reasons, but my objection was that he would also be lying to his customers, if the rumor was true.) Could it be that this part of the code was never removed and it is still underreporting this information? Who knows? (Well, I'm sure at least Vasik knows.)

To be honest, aside from my concern mentioned above, there are several ways to define node count, so if you're comparing node counts between engines, you might well be comparing apples to oranges. A more accurate way to compare engine strengths is to just run them head to head and see if they perform according to the established rating lists.

Thanks EscherehcsE. I was aware of the Rybka connection but not the under-reported node count. I'll try the head-to-head and see what happens. I think I am not unreasonably expecting to see some performance improvement from Fritz15 over DF14, after all, it was promoted by Chessbase as a step forward. Perhaps node count and ply depth isn't a good measure if some new AI programming gives it an edge in another way. Someone from Chessbase could clear this up in an instant, but like you confirm, it is unlikely to happen. Probably won't be buying Fritz16.

To be fair to Fritz 15 I did run some head to heads and these were the (not statistically significant) results:

Against Deep Fritz 14, 2hr per side for 40 moves as White, draw

Against Stockfish 7-64bit, 2hrs per side as White, draw

Against Deep Fritz 14, 4min+2sec per move blitz as White, draw

Against Stockfish 7-64bit, 4min+2sec per move blitz as White, win for Fritz 15

Fritz 15 was definitely reaching lower kN/s counts and ply depth, but held it's own very well and came out top. Perhaps it is "thinking" differently about positions which enables it to do this. Anyway, I'm sure it is more than strong enough for my meagre talents.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/fritz-15-engine-questions-and-answers

It is Rybka 4.1 with some refactoring and plans for improvement.

If for some reason you want to an engine that reaches deep positions fast, most people would recommend Stockfish for this purpose. But I don't think it's needed by most players. Most variations that Stockfish arrives at are truly inhuman

I have encountered it being slow too, so i use stockfish and issue resolved.

Stockfish 7 should be about 150 to 200 points (or more) higher than Fritz 15, according to the rating lists. When doing head-to-head testing, you need to verify that the test conditions are as equal as possible between the engines; Same hashtable size, same number of cpu threads, all engines on "no ponder", etc. And one game won't do it. More like hundreds of games, if you're going to get any accuracy in the results.

I'm sure you don't intend to go to this much trouble, but you should at least know that the results may be meaningless unless you do the testing under proper conditions.

Could you elaborate on this issue with the Database...I have no problem with personally created databases on DF 14, perhaps a screenshot may help explain?

Hello Trevor-D. The Database Browser window refuses to show anything more than the screenshot below (2nd shot). This is despite multiple other databases being in my /Documents /Chessbase/Bases folder in Win 10 (see 1st screenshot). The Fritz 15 manual says "If you want to display your own databases with the database browser copy them into the default folder. In the picture you can see that the databases have been copied into the folder /My Documents/ChessBase/Shop. Now they can be directly accessed with the database browser.

I have never found this to be the case.

Do you use stockfish in Chessbase?

I seem to be having troubles with setting it up. I plugged in SF7 into two different machines, one on Win7 and one on Win10, and on both it just hogs all the resources of my machine making it unresponsive for a few seconds at a time while it's calculating.

I cannot figure out why. Default Fritz doesn't do that.

If anyone has an idea on where to ask about that, please help me out.

I don't have MacOS but these chess engines should be set to low priority so you can keep using your PC while they are working.

There must be an option for that.

There is so called "smart CPU usage" when you click "Add kibitzer", and then select SF and click "Advanced" button at th bottom of that screen which is offering you engines.

It is turned on by default. In other words, it does not help.

You can, after clicking "Advanced", also check out "Engine parameters".

Nothing there seems to be useful.

Is this helpful?

http://help.chessbase.com/Fritz/15/Eng/index.html?ucipriori.htm

It is!
Stockfish still hogs up a ton of resources (I definitely wouldn't mind limiting that a bit as my processor fan goes crazy), but it no longer locks up my machine for 4-5 seconds at a time at random.

Thank you very much!

You can reduce the threads that Stockfish uses. I don't know how computer-knowledgeable you are but if you want me to help, post your CPU type and how many threads Stockfish currently uses.

Fritz 15 is just a rebadged Rybka 4.1 with a couple of improvements.  Rybka has always counted nodes and depth differently.   It is significantly stronger than Fritz 14 by about ~130 elo.  It's ~200 elo weaker than Komodo and Stockfish.

When adding engines to Chessbase it automatically sets itself to the amount of threads your CPUs support rather than the amount of physical cores.  For most people, the thread count should be 2 or 4.  That's one reason that your system appears to lock up.

No, the reason for the momentary lockups was that the Stockfish engine was running at medium priority, which is a bad idea.

The reason for full fan usage and high temperatures is the full CPU usage because of multithreading. It can be fixed with reducing the thread usage.

Houdini 5 will be out this year, so you can replace Fritz with that.