Controlling Multiple Cores

[Silent light]

Hi there,

I am considering getting a quad core computer. My question is this. If I have a quad core and I am playing WoW and also processing some video streams, can I assign say 2 cores to WoW, 1 core to streams and the remaining to run the OS?

In other words can I assign processes to cores?

Thanks in advance.

Steven

 

[Scotteq]

WOW will not run on multiple cores. The ability to run across multiple processors is a feature of the application, not the OS, and that game is not at all designed to do that. I don't believe that any older game are. I know the Crysis can, and perhaps some of the other newer games, but those have been coded to take advantage of multiple processing cores. The same applies to any other software you have running - If the app was written to use multiple cores, then it will do so.



What will happen is that the OS will assign cores on demand to whatever processes need the power, and generally speaking it is (barely!?!?) intelligent enough to do so without intervention. So what you will get is WOW on 1 core, your streams on another, etc etc etc...

Scott

 

[Silent light]

Got ya. I had hoped that any app that had multiple threads could split the threads across multiple cores. I thought this used to happen with multi cpu systems with apps back in the day (NT multi cpu version), I had assumed cores worked the same.

So there is NO way to assign or block processes from accessing a core? Imagine I had 20 3d renderings going and good old WoW I really would not want the renderings to be spread out over all 4 cores . . . I would really want WoW to have its own. That was my hope anyway. Maybe vista cannot do things the way I want. Or more accurately it COULD do them but whether it exposes the interface to let me do it is another matter.

Now I am also wondering how well vista handles sharing i/o resources with 4 cores chugging along at once . . .

Thanks for the reply.

Steven

 

[Scotteq]

In my experience, it's not bad at all: The active window takes precedence, and the rest gets what's left. I don't beat up on my comp nearly as bad as your example, but I have compiled video in the background, streamed audio, and played a game at the same time with little drop in performance.

The limitations seem to be more to do with memory and general throughput more than processing power. Your game and other apps still need X amount of RAM apiece, yah? Data still needs to be swapped to/from the HDD, etc etc etc... You still only have 1 system bus, after all. That'll cause slowdowns way before you'll run into CPU based slowdowns.

 

[softtouch]

There is a way, just open task manager, right click the program there and select "Affinity". There you can select the cores.