Setting Core Affinity and Priority for Performance Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

I was intrigued by some correspondence I have received from a few players who mentioned going into task manager
and tweaking their Core Affinity settings to help squeeze more out of their older generation CPU's. The Xray engine
is basically a single core program. I compared FPS, CPU Temp, Percentage of core use, and overall CPU useage
under 3 different configurations:
1) Windows 7 default Core Affinity All Cores, Priority Normal (default).
2) Core affinity All Cores, Priority to HIGH (note realtime is not recommended for system stability)
3) Core affinity 2,3,4 (1 unchecked) Priority HIGH.

There seemed to be a slight performance boost on High priority but first core gets maxed out at 100% with only about
51-52% total CPU usage and average of maybe 50% usage on other cores.

Now when I unchecked the first core making only 2-4 concentrate on game at HIGH Priority My lowest average FPS
increased from 25 (limited at 60 FPS) to no lower than 45 FPS and Overall CPU usage increased to 55%. The
average of cores 2-4 rose to 90%. Temp changes were minor.

All you have to do to try this is start the game and open task manager, right click on xrEngine.exe in processes and
go down to Set Priority and Set Affinity and make adjustments. This has to be done each time after you start game.

I need some feedback from players with CPU's under 3GHZ to see if this helps them significantly.

Please monitor your FPS and lag/stuttering in game and how it seems to be effected using all but your first core and on
HIGH priority. Does your FPS average increase? Does lag/stuttering decrease any?

Thank you in advance for trying this out

Edited by: jasper34

Very good advice!

I've tried this once and I did notice better performance with the game. I'll try this again next time I play and post again, along with my rig specs.

I'm also curious to see if this works for others as well

I should try this

If you have a dual core, just try High Priority first. For 3 or more use all but first core.

What CPU did you try this with?

i5-3570K which is 4 core. I made cores 2,3 & 4 have affinity for Xray and left 1st core for everything else in background. I'd love to try it on one of those slower 3.2GHZ 8 core CPU's. 3.2GHZ is fairly slow for Misery. My 4.6GHZ showed some boost, I expect it would be more a more dramatic difference on a slower CPU.

AMD A10 5750M here. Quad core Locked at 3.2 GHz. High priority, 30 or 40 FPS at most intensive places in vanilla CoP maxed out. CPU0 disabled - no difference at all.

Maybe Skadovsk isn't best place to check FPS - it's overloaded with AI and engine is slow to process it.

Regular COP without Misery? How much ram do you have? What are your video settings? Heaviest AI is in Jupiter map, especially near plant. Jupiter is nearly twice as busy as Zaton at least in Misery.

16GB DDR3 1600MHz

7200 RPM HDD

Radeon HD8970M = Desktop Radeon HD8750 (950MHz core clock)

Totally vanilla CoP 1.6.002 EN. All maxed out on DX11 except for antialiasing. 1920x1080.

I guess there are different reasons to FPS drops. My CPU isn't good at processing geometry - complicated scenes lower my framerate. The game's own AI system might be not so well optimised, so there are performance problems near Skadovsk and Yanov. Combine these two factors together and playing with CPU Affinity won't help.

I'll uncap my FPS to see if your method helps in places with less AI.

Edited by: Cossack-HD

The workload in vanilla COP is negligible compared to Misery. The default alife is double in Misery and much much more activity in terms of squads of mutants and NPC's on map at once. Shouldn't that CPU boost to 3.5GHZ? How is the distribution of load on your cores? Does it change if you disable affinity on first core or does the second core take up all the load?

It boosts to 3.5 GHz on one core for like 5% of time - that's nothing. Load distribution doesn't change - one of the cores loads to 100%, second up to 50%, third and fourth are almost chillin'

16 FPS on one core, 24 on 2, 30 on 3 and 4.

Misery has greatly increased draw distance (weather settings) and higher polycount too. Using vanilla level geometry in Misery increases performance a lot BTW - Absolute Nature should come as an option IMO.

Probably AI is handled by another thread and since AI is heavier in Misery, playing around with affinity might help, but it seem useless for vanilla and Lost Alpha.

Edited by: Cossack-HD

I pretty much assume everything on this thread is Misery related. Stilvais did a 'lite' texture pack for Misery. His old link was dead, but someone recently told me a newer one. Have to find it again. Did you make COP a High priority for your CPU? It sucks about the very short boost on the one core ... I forgot they did that with some CPU's. I would try unchecking the one core that always loads to 100% and make it High Priority if it isn't just to see if it distributed load more among other cores. Appreciate all the feedback. I never toyed with it much, just built faster and faster boxes.

I gave this a shot just now, I started the game, loaded up my save and then alt-tabbed to change the engine's priority to high and set the affinity to cores 2, 3 and 4.

Sadly, this didn't yield any results for me

I used Fraps to monitor my fps. What I did was to stand at a safe place and look out over an open area and watch my fps. Then I alt-tabbed, applied the settings and went back in and watched my fps some more. I didn't see any noticeable change though...

I'm using a AMD Athlon II X4 635 CPU @2.9GHz

Has anyone else tried this and had better luck than me?

When you are standing still there is no new alife coming online and very little GPU strain. A better test would be watch you FPS counter as you run across the map. See if your average low FPS increases or decreases and same for stutter. The load is certainly more evenly distributed, and I seems to do a few FPS better overall, but I have a pretty fast rig. I noticed some very interesting stuff about CPU usage and started a thread on HBAO vs. HDAO.

Thanks for the advice! I'll try that out later and post my results. It does make sense now that you mention alife playing a big part in the CPU load.

Also, would you mind linking me to the thread about HBAO vs HDAO so I can find out which one is faster for my Nvidia card?

So i am the one who texted you about the new stivalis link like i said to you in the imails it seems that if i use all my cores the fps goes through the floor basically unpleyable i will try again with cores 1/3/5 than with 2/3/4/5/6 than 3/4/5/6 than 4/5/6 and few different combinations i will keep monitoring the cpu usage

Here is the stilvais light texture pack i got around 10fps increase from this pack and the game world alot smoother

Moddb.com

1 Make a second copy of your saved game (just in case)

2 Install the texture pack

2.5 You can play now but 5-6 textures inventory textures will be missing to fix do step 3

3 Install the 2.1.1 update again and play

if something goes wrong and the game stops working you can grab your saves put them in a folder somewhere download misery again turn it on and start a new game as soon as you go into the game save the game than quit and in the game folder you should find saves/profiles folder (not hard to find just look around) and delete the saves in there and drop your old ones in (this folder will not be there if you do not start a game and have atleast 1 save)

beanydood wrote:

Thanks for the advice! I'll try that out later and post my results. It does make sense now that you mention alife playing a big part in the CPU load.

Also, would you mind linking me to the thread about HBAO vs HDAO so I can find out which one is faster for my Nvidia card?

Unless you have a very old GPU which causes bottleneck, there won't be difference between HBAO and HDAO. HBAO is Nvidia tech AFAIK, at least one of them is AMD and other is NVidia. Regardless which one I use in games, I get same FPS (powerful AMD card).

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. bottleneck #1 is CPU.

HDAO is optimized for AMD. HBAO is just less load because it isn't HD. I actually found I had less CPU load using HDAO with my AMD cards when testing core affinity. If someone with a decent GPU can use HDAO, even on the low level, they may have more CPU headroom with a lesser core speed CPU.

Those who have AMD cards AND use DX11 should see much more efficiency with HDAO. COP is an ATI/AMD branded game and HDAO is optimized to run efficiently on Direct3D11 hardware.

Changing the game from DX11 back to DX10 gave me a HUGE boost in FPS

That's great! Whatever works best with each individual rig Sometimes when you check something different off it isn't really applied and can be misleading.
Dropbox.com You might be able to do even better ...

W O W ! ! ! I should have known about this a long time ago! It works PERFECTLY! I set xrEngine.exe to high priority and for affinity I un-checked CPU0 and voila!

I'm running an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz processor, without overclocking, and I'm getting over 60fps steady with enhanced DX11 on HDAO at maximum everything, everything on, even sun shadows! WOOT! NOW Misery Mod looks and plays BEAUTIFULLY! I wanna cry!

Of course I'm running that processor on a good - not great - motherboard (ASUS H81M-C), a couple of good memory sticks (Kingston DDR3 HyperX 8GB @CAS10), two SSD's (Kingston HyperX 240GB SH103S3240G), and an AMD/ATI R9 270X graphics card on AMDOverDrive, all of this under Windows 10 Pro

Edited by: CDIA

I used to run at 550-600 switch_distance and have a few of the performance hogs turned off for same performance. I am currently using 400 which gives ample Sniper vision distance without causing too many groups to stray in search of trouble they see in distance. I also have everything now turned on and have less stutter to boot. The default 300 meters is probably still better, I haven't tried it yet. You never know if something will help until you experiment, so I experiment a lot

Minimal stutter at 360 switch_distance here.. I just don't want missions completing/failing on their own because of me not having enough time to run and protect and/or kill..

I wish I could run MM (Misery Mod) at 800 switch_distance and not have to worry about THOSE problems, you know?

Again, thank you very much for these tips. Be well.

Yeah, problem is when you can see that far so can everything else. I find something new that can tweak performance almost every time I wade back in a try something new. New scripts for 2.2 show much promise of further optimization

You're the man, good Sir!

Also, could we give cataracts to NPC's and mutants so they wouldn't be able to see that far?