Issue with game and quad core...

Philoso

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Ok im having a strange issue here with my AMD Phenom Black Quad Core 3.2ghz CPU. I play a game called Everquest which supposedly only runs on 1 Core of a any multi core cpu. It evens automatically sets the game to run on a single core on startup, this is suppose to help people who play multi instances of the game for boxing purposes on multi-cores. Now whats going on with my cpu is whenever i start Everquest Core0 will be completly maxed at 98% -100% which causes bad fps drops every few mins im able to counteract this buy going into task manager and setting Affinity to run on all cores. When i do this the load is dramatically decreased on Core0 and seems to be spread through all the cores. Im completly confused on why this is happening seeing as EQ is only able to run on a single core anyways they say. And even if im only running on 1 core why is an old game from 99 maxing my single core out? If anyone has an answer to this id much appreciate it, i like to fix it so it will run nice on 1 core like i tshould or some way to auto set it too run on all cores on startup, instead of having to go into task manager everytime i start the game and resetting Affinity. I hope someone can shed some light on this please.
Thanks
Sam
 

Philoso

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Aye its not though its an older game and supposedly it doesn't have multi core support..Getting better performance on multi core's isnt suppose to happen from what i understand. The reason it auto sets the game to 1 core is for people that want to box multiple characters in the past it did set the game to all cores and people had to manually go in and change each instance to a single core...Now the game automatically sets to each available core. I have no idea why my core0 is getting pushed to 100% load whenver i log in.
 

Baralis

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Everquest is an older game, when it was designed multi-cpus were not mainstream and so it was designed with single core processors in mind. When you set core affinity to all cores it is simply dividing the workload of one core across many and you are not really gaining any real advantage. However that game should run fine on your current CPU which leads me to believe your poor performance may be caused by something else. Could you list your other pc parts and the resolution you play at?
 

Philoso

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no it has to be the load on cpu0 cuz when i set to affinity it instantly fixes the problem... ive tested it many times...something on eq is causing my core0 to max out at 100% on core0...i even totally reinstalled windows7 and it still has the same problem
 

Philoso

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Put my comp is AMD 3.2ghz Phenom Black Quad Core, Gigabyte MB, ATI RAdeon 5770 GPU, 8gigs of Corsair DDR3 1033 RAM, 700W 80plus Antec PSU, and a Corsair H70 Liquid CPU cooler.

Resolution is 1920 x 1080 which is my monitors resolution.
 

Baralis

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This has me curious now. Have you tried to set the affinity to any other single core instead of core0? Does it result in the same performance? When you set affinity to all cores does it give you more overall CPU usage?

I play a number of games that are designed for single core cpu usage and is not designed for multicore support. With these games it generally sets the usage to a single core affinity by default. One game I play always assigns to core0 while another always assigns to core3. When I set affinity to all cores it simply divides usage among cores so instead of 1 @ 100% I have 4 @ 25%. I gain no more cpu usage overall.




Ya that should run Everquest with no problems. So at least we have hardware specs ruled out. There are several programs out there that will allow you to auto set the affinity of programs when they start. This could be a solution to your problem. Having never tried one personally I cannot vouch for their success but may be worth looking into, just google affinity setters.


 

Philoso

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Yeah the overall cpu usage stays the same which is usually pretty low when running EQ like 30% or so, when the program starts its auto set to core0 which is at 100% and the rest at low %s like 5-10% range not really getting used...ive tried setting EQ to run on other single cores and get same result. When i set too all cores aye it spread the load like you said ill get like 50-70% on Core0 and 30% loads in the other cores. Its just odd this is improving game performance i cant explain it but it is...when i was running single core id get a fps drop every min for a few secs at a time which would lag me out bad then it go back to normal...Certain zones always triggered it and once it would start it continue untill i restarted the game...after restarting it be fixed but would come back again either by zoning into new zone or being logged in for a a while. Now that ive spread the load on all the cores the issue is gone which very odd i cant explain it but there it is... Yeah im looking for a program like that i couldnt really find one that worked ill google Affinityh setter maybe ill find one.
Thanks