MASSIVE PERF BOOST TRICK! NO FA COMPROMISES! (sticky plz)

C.Lupus

Ok- in light of some recent discoveried- DON'T USE REALTIME. just set it to high and put everything else (except vital system stuff) on some lower setting.

This trick massivly boosts FA's performance. (especially if you have stuff running in the background- only compromise is that the background stuff will run slower)

Even better with MadBorris's coremax!

OLD

Code:

How to do it (unfortunatly this must be done everytime FA is started annoyingly)
(FA must be started for this to work)
The more cores- the better! I think!
1)use alt+ctrl+del to bring up the task manager
2)click the processes tabs
3)sort the list by name
4)Right click the CoreMax.exe and set priority to HIGH
5)Right click the ForgedAlliance.exe and set priority to HIGH
6)Right click any other memory or cpu intensive applications and set affinity to CORE1 and above only (don't let them use CORE0)
7)Close the task manager
8)Enjoy FA running at rediculously fast speeds

Quote:

* Start FA
* ALT-TAB out of FA and CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager.
* Sort the list by CPU usage.
* Right-click any app consistently using more than a 5-10% of your CPU
* Select 'set affinity,' and remove the checkbox from 'Core 0,' repeating for each high-CPU-use app.
* Sort list by Memory usage, and close programs using a large amount of RAM, if you can bear to part with them.
* OPTIONAL:Sort processes by name, and right-click CoreMax.exe and Forged Alliance.exe setting priority to HIGH, or REALTIME. These settings, especially REALTIME may cause system instabilities, stuttering, or system slowdown, up to and including driver failures and system crashes. HOWEVER- NO ONE has reported this yet- use at your own risk. HIGH actually performes better BTW rather than REALTIME which has a higher tendancy to cause stuttering
* Close task manager.
* Play the game, dummy.

pkc · **Joined:** 20 Feb, 2007 **Posts:** 8555

nice. ill experiment with it when i get home, cheers

Techubus · **Joined:** 20 Mar, 2007 **Posts:** 1881

Sounds so simple and yet makes a lot of sense. I'll give this a shot and and run some perf tests.

pyro786 · **Joined:** 28 Nov, 2007 **Posts:** 37

AWESOME!
It works!
sticky this.

Vid-szhite

Wow, great find. Someone needs to make a program that does this on its own now.

C.Lupus

how big of a boost did you get?
my Pentium D (I know it sounds bad) went from about 0.3-0.25 FPS all the way to about 20-30FPS! :shock:

And that's with COREMAX OFF! :shock:

Vid-szhite

C.Lupus wrote:

how big of a boost did you get?
my Pentium D (I know it sounds bad) went from about 0.3-0.25 FPS all the way to about 20-30FPS! :shock:

And that's with COREMAX OFF! :shock:

WHAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTT??? :shock:

Usling2

do you have to do this every game or just once? I don't trust Windows Vista...

BOTA:99

(unfortunatly this must be done everytime FA is started annoyingly)

^^
Taken from op's post.

Usling2

I fail at reading comprehension. Well, could be useful if i wanna play some huge FFA or something...

JWest

How hard would it be to write a program that does this automatically?

Casey · **Joined:** 18 Feb, 2007 **Posts:** 1195

JWest wrote:

How hard would it be to write a program that does this automatically?

Not very.

C.Lupus

unfortunatly- I don't know. If I knew I'd have done it along time ago. :lol:

I can do a little C# programming

----------------------------------------

it works for vanilla too- but it's impact is substantially less which is why i never bothered posting it. It was only since I was blown so far out of my chair that I posted this.

pyro786 · **Joined:** 28 Nov, 2007 **Posts:** 37

Hopefully it'll be incorporated into the next version of core maximizer.

C.Lupus

pyro786 wrote:

Hopefully it'll be incorporated into the next version of core maximizer.

unfortunatly MadBoris has left. We'd need someone else to create this...

scotchtape622 · **Joined:** 15 Mar, 2007 **Posts:** 4756

Why did he leave?

Thank you so much C.Lupus, I am picking up FA retail on Thursday!

pyro786 · **Joined:** 28 Nov, 2007 **Posts:** 37

fingers crossed somebody who knows how to code stumbles across this thread.

wizard8873 · **Joined:** 22 Feb, 2007 **Posts:** 81 **Location:** IN

sweet. i'll have to try this out at home. def sticky this though.

Techubus · **Joined:** 20 Mar, 2007 **Posts:** 1881

You can launch any process from the command line with whatever priority you want with the following command:

start /realtime ProgramYouWantToLaunch.exe

You can use anything from /realtime to /low to set the priority at launch.
You can also set this command directly in the games shortcut so you can just double click the FA icon to run it.

Now heres the problem. I checked real quick and I didn't see a way to force GPGnet to execute this command when it launches the game, since it doesn't use the desktop shortcut. If anyone can find a way to force this command to be run byt GPGnet we've got an easy performance booster.

This should be a great fix for people who like playing against skirmish AI though.

Lurkily

Be very careful with REALTIME. It will use resources as that program asks for it - not in the order programs ask for CPU time. This means if you have a program that consistantly boost your CPU to 100%, -nothing else- will be permitted to use your CPU - including your OS, which means in turn, the game will die. This is the reason it only works on multicore systems.

Though I'm surprised that FA, running on all cores, does not simply eat all available processing on all cores until the system dies - I usually try to stick to VERY HIGH, to be safe.

Also, I believe FA is written for multiple cores, and the Maximizer is not required anymore - am I wrong?

Techubus · **Joined:** 20 Mar, 2007 **Posts:** 1881

Lurkily wrote:

Be very careful with REALTIME. It will use resources as that program asks for it - not in the order programs ask for CPU time. This means if you have a program that consistantly boost your CPU to 100%, -nothing else- will be permitted to use your CPU - including your OS, which means in turn, the game will die. This is the reason it only works on multicore systems.

Though I'm surprised that FA, running on all cores, does not simply eat all available processing on all cores until the system dies - I usually try to stick to VERY HIGH, to be safe.

Also, I believe FA is written for multiple cores, and the Maximizer is not required anymore - am I wrong?

Good point. If you have problems with REALTIME then setting to High should still help without causing this to occur.

EDIT: Oh hey, take a look at this site and tell me what you guys think. It might just do the trick http://www.prioritymaster.com/

dcbo89 · **Joined:** 16 Apr, 2007 **Posts:** 2037

yes, generally setting a program to realtime can crash your pc if your not careful. However i will try very high and see what happens

Astroman

I generally close off other applications, both on desktop and in background when playing to get better perf., but I notice GPGNet client takes up a lot of memory. Would setting that to Core1 or higher be OK?

C.Lupus

Astroman wrote:

I generally close off other applications, both on desktop and in background when playing to get better perf., but I notice GPGNet client takes up a lot of memory. Would setting that to Core1 or higher be OK?

deffinatly

oh i added a warning about realtime at the top

Lurkily

I did a little test.

I got a 10-15 FPS performance boost just by clearing things out of Core0 WITHOUT changing priority. It seems that most of FA's CPU-intensive code runs on Core0 no matter how many you have.

EDIT: Check that. My usual FPS is 25-30 early-mid game. I'm now getting a consistent 45-50. Make that a 20 FPS gain.

MASSIVE PERF BOOST TRICK! NO FA COMPROMISES! (sticky plz)

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