Can I get better performance for a single-core game by having it run on core #2 (CPU 1)

[WhipperSnapper]

I enjoy playing the game Sins of a Solar Empire but it starts to lag once there are hundreds of ships. I run the game on a Socket 939 Athlon X2 4400, which has 1 MB cache on each core and runs at 2.2 Ghz at stock speed. (It's a crappy overclocker and I can only squeeze 2.4 Ghz out of it.) I have 2 GB of RAM and an 8800 GT. In the task manager I've noticed that Core #1 is being used at 100% and the only other programs I run while playing are mIRC, Firefox, and Windows Media Player (for listening to SomaFM.com radio).

What would happen if, in the Task Manager, I set the game so that it would only run on CPU #1 (core #2)? Might I enjoy better performance if it weren't running on the same core as Windows XP and whatever else is running?

 

[graysky]

I don't think so dude... have you looked to see how effectively the game uses both the cores by keeping task manager running while you play, then exiting the game after 10 min or so and looking at the graphs? You might need to lower the update speed to the slowest level.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

It seems to use a single core at about 95% and 100% when it's lagging. What do you mean by "update speed"?

 

[Tweakin]

The

Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper

It seems to use a single core at about 95% and 100% when it's lagging. What do you mean by "update speed"?

The update speed of taskmanager...setting it to high and you will see the graph jump all over the place.

 

[nyker96]

ummmm ... no :[

on second thought, install that AMD x2 patch see if it balance out the cores.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Maybe you could set all your background processes to Core 2 and have the game run on Core 1?

 

[Mango1970]

I did what you are suggesting for quite some time -- still do actually for some things. It might be a little different in my case though; I played Everquest for some time and noted I got the best performance, at that time, on my X2-4800+ when the game was set to core 1 and I had the game installed on a separate hardrive than the OS. Then I made sure I had both the AMD dual core optimizer patch and the AMD dual core drivers installed. That worked flawlessly for me. I found that not doing this, I would get certain slow downs, and also I would look at my core 0 and it would be running way hotter than core 1 which made sense. I always figured that Windows XP would do some decent load balancing between the 2 cores, but eventually setting the game to core 1, and leaving all else to Windows to play mainly on core 0, things went way smoother. Everquest is certainly not optimized for multiple cores... so it was not getting any benefit from having multiple cores. Also something else I noted, that when i had the game on core 1, switching to something else that was running in the background, was faster and smoother.