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Reg -> RE: THE THREAD!!! (7/29/2009 1:39:27 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Dixie
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ORIGINAL: USS America
Have you guys seen the tech support thread for speeding up the game on multiple core processors? I've got to try that. My laptop is a dual core. [:)]
Not sure what I'm doing wrong here. It doesn't seem any faster to me [:(]
A quick search of the web came up with the following:
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YARDofSTUF (http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=187768)
With HyperThreading and Dual Core CPUs being common in all kinds of systems there may be alot of people interested in controlling which processes use which CPU. This would work for Dual CPU systems to.
The program to use for this is Imagecfg.exe. You can google it to find a download, or get it off of a Windows 2000 or Windows XP Server Resource Kit.
Imagecfg.exe will work with Windows XP(32 bit and 64 bit), Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and hopefully Windows Vista. It is a permanent change to the file, so make a backup before testing.
Imagecfg.exe has a bunch of uses, use the "/?" switch to see all of your choices.
To set a process's affinity use "imagecfg -a 0xn [File Path] [File Name]
Replace n with the CPU you want the process to use.
1 = CPU0
2 = CPU1
4 = CPU2
8 = CPU3
So if you wanted to set C:\Test\Dummy.exe to use the second CPU(CPU1) ir would look like this:
imagecfg -a 0x2 C:\Test\Dummy.exe
For dual core or dual CPU users both CPUs will perform equally, but with HyperThreading enabled systems the first CPU (CPU0) is faster, because the 2nd CPU is just a virtual CPU recycling unused cycles from the first CPU.
By moving processes around it can allow you maximize the performance of CPU intensive programs and games by assigning all necessary processes to 1 CPU, freeing the other CPU for the intensive application.
I've just started messing around with this so I don't have any benchmarks or proof that this does anything, theoretically it should help, most likely in a very small ammount though.
Flaws:
Imagecfg does not seem to recognize folders with spaces in it like "C:\Program Files". To get by this copy the Imagecfg.exe file to that directory and exclude the directory /path.
You are in effect turning your multicore into a single CPU system running AE exclusively with the other cores just doing the system overhead tasks when they can get a look in. On the whole I would say that you should be able to squeeze a few more CPU cycles out of your system for the primary task (and eliminate multicore race conditions) but I wouldn't expect miracles. It would depend a lot on how efficiently you system is currently running.
Personally I might be a bit concerned about having a huge CPU cycle hog running on a single processor generating large amounts heat concentrated in one part of the cpu chip, rather than spreading the thermal load evenly. I wonder what that would be doing to the long term life expectancy of the CPU?? Probably nothing if it is adequately cooled but some over-clockers running on the edge might have an issue. I can't imagine that laptops are overly cooled either.
Just a thought,
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