Speeding up that dinosaur CPU

[Herbert]

Hi All

1st Step: Go to control panels, double click on power options and make sure your CPU isn't in power saving mode. Put it to balanced and when your CPU needs to up its activity it can source the power it needs to do that.

2nd Step: Open task manager and alter the affinity of each process running. This is where you set what cores each process uses. You can have all processes using the first core of your cpu and then have FA using the second core by itself if you have a dualcore cpu. If you have more than 2 cores I advise still making sure that FA uses 1 core all on its own. Your cpu rating in the game lobby will drop quite a bit when you do it.

3rd Step; Open the start menu and in the search boc type msconfig. Run it, note the name of all startup services/processes running and do a search on them on the internet. It will tell you which can be disabled. For instance if you use cable you can disable dial-up connection, if you dont use a tablet you can disable tablet services, etc, etc. This will also speed up your pc.

That should help until you get new cpu's.

[E8400-CV]

Go into the BIOS and increase FSB

Six year old Intel C2D's still beat new AMD's that way...

[_Legolan]

First of all, thank you for starting this thread. Seriously.

I saw it a couple days ago and bookmarked it as something interesting to come back to. Then I got asked to leave a 4v4 Setons game earlier tonight because my CPU was bad. In fairness, my CPU score was in the 370s-380s, which I'll admit is bad (I keep settings low so I don't generally lag, but I completely understand people's desire to avoid lag). I found that closing absolutely everything else could drop me into the 360s after restarting my computer.

So I followed your recommendations. Marking Forged Alliance as "High priority" rather than "normal priority" brought me down into the 330s-340s. Changing the core affinities brought me down to the 240s-260s. I haven't played a large game with the adjustments yet, but I'm assuming those are real functional gains.

So seriously, thank you. I'm going to look into overclocking some, but it's nice to know it probably isn't /necessary/ for me to have a good enough CPU score to keep playing the 4v4s on 20km maps that I really enjoy.

I do have a couple questions though. When I close Forged Alliance and later relaunch it, it doesn't retain the prior settings. The priority reverts to "normal" and it defaults to the wrong core (I have a C2D, but it lets me select core 0, 1, 2, and 3 -- so I put everything else on 0 and 1 and Forged Alliance on 2 and 3). Upon hosting a new game, my CPU score is ~389. After changing the priority and the core affinities, it is ~265. Obviously that's a huge difference. If needed, I could adjust it for every game, but is there any way to make it save the program specific settings for priority and core affinity for Forged Alliance?

[JeeVeS]

You can use this:
https://bitsum.com/processlasso/

Just changing around priority/affinity shouldn't be giving you such a massive boost in performance, however. The only thing I can think of is you have a ton of background programs that normally run on core 0/1. I think windows 7 will naturally unload the core that FA runs its heaviest calculations on, which usually seems to be core 0.

This is certainly a good discussion to have. In GPG someone made a program called "Core Maximizer" that apparently distributed loads better. It doesn't seem to do much for me, but I would encourage others to take a look.

The main thread on it is located here:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15556

Reddev32 posts a working download link on the last page (15).

[Herbert]

On pre Windows 7 I think the benefits of affinity are better as cores before that time weren't correctly managed by the operating systems. I'm not sure they were even managed at all.

[E8400-CV]

No way you get from 370 to 240 by messing around with priorities. Unless of course you have some really bad stuff going on in the background..

[_Legolan]

Thanks for the recommendation, JeeVeS, I'll definitely look into that.

I'm surprised by the size of the change in CPU rating as well. I'm not an expert by any means, but I think the original 370+ ratings were fairly inaccurate (I played a 4v4 Setons game later last night where I was at +1 when someone with a 330-340 CPU rating was at -1; not an astounding difference, granted, but certainly not what you'd expect if the "true" rating was 370+). I mostly just wanted to thank Herbert for posting the tips that seem to make a meaningful difference for me. Even if the actual change is half the ostensible difference, it'll still be a big help, I think.

EDIT: Update, I tried Process Lasso, and it seems to work excellently. Thanks again for the link!

[Herbert]

First of all, thank you for starting this thread. Seriously.

I saw it a couple days ago and bookmarked it as something interesting to come back to. Then I got asked to leave a 4v4 Setons game earlier tonight because my CPU was bad. In fairness, my CPU score was in the 370s-380s, which I'll admit is bad (I keep settings low so I don't generally lag, but I completely understand people's desire to avoid lag). I found that closing absolutely everything else could drop me into the 360s after restarting my computer.

So I followed your recommendations. Marking Forged Alliance as "High priority" rather than "normal priority" brought me down into the 330s-340s. Changing the core affinities brought me down to the 240s-260s. I haven't played a large game with the adjustments yet, but I'm assuming those are real functional gains.

So seriously, thank you. I'm going to look into overclocking some, but it's nice to know it probably isn't /necessary/ for me to have a good enough CPU score to keep playing the 4v4s on 20km maps that I really enjoy.

I do have a couple questions though. When I close Forged Alliance and later relaunch it, it doesn't retain the prior settings. The priority reverts to "normal" and it defaults to the wrong core (I have a C2D, but it lets me select core 0, 1, 2, and 3 -- so I put everything else on 0 and 1 and Forged Alliance on 2 and 3). Upon hosting a new game, my CPU score is ~389. After changing the priority and the core affinities, it is ~265. Obviously that's a huge difference. If needed, I could adjust it for every game, but is there any way to make it save the program specific settings for priority and core affinity for Forged Alliance?

http://www.overclock.net/t/1019630/set- ... ermanently

You still need to do the background processes when you switch on. Unless you know where all their exe files are an alter them one by one.

Does anybody know if the memory cache inside a cpu is fixed in how each core uses it? Or if you can assign more to a specific core?

That would make the game faster too.

[Typo91]

Herbert, look man, i know you mean well but this is a bunch of non-sense

The affinity thing might get a better score, but only because of how the test is preformed, I assure you its an artificial improvement.

Take it from a fortune 500 global IT senior admin, that has been playing Supreme Commander since 2006 (pre-release)

The average user shouldn't be poking around in msconfig, sure you can find a few things that are problems, like malware thats using some CPU cycles. Or perhaps force-ably removing installed software like Norton.

This game is probably one of the most taxing CPU intensive games you'll find out there, especially in some of the more epic ones.

The bottom line is you need something good to play it on, something with outstanding per core performance... take the i7 2600k for example.

I know a lot of people might disagree with the following, but here is 10 good rules to follow.

-Never run antivirus or any such overlay software on your gaming rig (the best antivirus is attention to details)
-Never run any kind of firewall or protective software on a gaming rig
-Never install craptasticware like Skype or BuddyIM or such on a gaming rig
-Use extreme care when browsing the internet and downloading software
-Always use a host file in windows (google "host file" click the first thing and get that)
-Check every running tasks on your OS, go down the list 1 by 1 till you have validated it all (do this once every few months)
-Remember there is no such thing as "magic fix all/clean all software" dont trust anything even stuff like CClean and Hi-jackthis are merely tools.
-Never keep mission critical data or work on your gaming rig, get an external drive or something for your stuff.
-Treat your gaming rig like a formula 1 Race car, not a custom street car, generally keep things lean and as close to mainstream setup as possible.
-Updates are fine, but not always needed, dont rush to grab the lastest version of anything enless your having issues with your current version.

In the future if you want to get more performance out of your outdated rig... do yourself a favor, dont. Its a waste of time. If you are playing FA, chances are you are putting 40min to and hour and a half into your games... if you spend a few hours mowing a yard or waiting some tables you'll have enough to build a perfectly suitable gaming rig in a week or two.

I consider anyone who plays FA with any skill at all to be a pretty serious gamer. So get out there and get yourself a serious gaming rig... you can build something that will run FA just great for under 500 bucks, i bet you could talk someone out of that kind of cash if you just try harder. The sooner you start making some cash the sooner you can lose more of your life playing FA at 60 fps with all its effects and glory enabled!

[da_monstr]

-text wall snip-

I concur with you on pretty much all points there. It's sad that people still play this game on 1st gen Core 2 Duos in this day and age, despite the age of those systems. I personally dealt with a few of those sytems and they can't even deal with Google Chrome and MS Office normally anymore. I don't dare even think what would happen if I were to throw FA at those systems...
And sure, you can upgrade, but that is just not worth it.
One of the best options is to get a Pentium G3258 and overclock it balls to the wall, that way you get a really good FA machine.
Just my 2 cents.