handihoc Posted September 30, 2008 Share Posted September 30, 2008 I've got a Core 2 Duo E6600. I've noticed, by opening the Performance window in Windows Task Manager, that when playing SF one cpu gets used to the full, while the other is pretty much idle. With general applications both cpus are used. For such a power hungry game I'd like to make the most of both cpus. Anyone know, is there a way to do this? Running XP Media home with 2Gig RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkmage Posted September 30, 2008 Share Posted September 30, 2008 Handi, atleast in previous patches if you disable 1 core and have CMSF running on just 1 you seem to get better performance. Not sure if this has changed with marines. Also I seem to remember BFC trying to move over to dual core but had some problems with the code? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dima Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 On my Core 2 I get both CPU's used. Not to 100%, but they are used. If you have nVidia card make sure to find and enable a driver setting that makes drivers use both CPU's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
missinginreality Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 On my Core 2 I get both CPU's used. Not to 100%, but they are used. If you have nVidia card make sure to find and enable a driver setting that makes drivers use both CPU's. Dima, strange that you have found an improvement with this coz on my Core2Duo/Nvidia i found an improvement with turning mutli-threading to OFF. Weird. Might give it another go see if I notice a difference when I get 1.10/marines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handihoc Posted October 1, 2008 Author Share Posted October 1, 2008 I've tried adjusting the cpu settings in nVidia control, but it makes minimal, if any, difference either way. The problem I've got is in the Marines Campaign mission Battle for Objective Pooh. A great battle, but on a very big urban map with, after an hour, many many units in play. At this point the game slows to a crawl and often crashes, so I'm wondering if I'll actually be able to complete it. No matter the cpu setting, one Core is being used to the max, the other hardly at all. So potentially I've still got fifty percent of my cpu power able to handle the game, but it doesn't. Very annoying. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cougar_DK Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 My rather old AMD XP64 4400 Dual Core has one core at 100% and the other most of the time at 0%. I have tried to move CMSF to the second core but haven't really seen any difference, rather than it going to 100% and the first go to 0%. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted October 2, 2008 Share Posted October 2, 2008 CMx2's core code was written before dual processors were really on the table as a standard consumer CPU. It is a non-trivial task to recode the core of the game to use more than one processor. Therefore, at present CM:SF does not support additional processors. Any usage of the second processor is being done by non-CM:SF programs, which of course means CM doesn't have to compete with those processes. This doesn't really mean as much of a performance decrease as you guys may think. A single processor is able to handle the game mechanics and graphics concurrently, therefore having more CPU cycles won't dramatically improve the current game engine's performance. Perhaps graphics would be faster, however that is far more a function of the graphics card and other sub systems in use rather than the CPU itself. We don't see much purpose in changing over to multi-processor right now. The primary advantage for the game system is to use the extra processor power to add new features and/or to increase fidelity of the underlying game engine in some way/s. However, in order to do that we need to first code those features and other changes. Since we've got enough tasks on our plate that don't really benefit from extra CPU power (like Quick Battles, for example) AND we would have to abandon support for single processor systems, it will probably be a while before we get to doing this. But absolutely we will. Handihoc, we've not experienced any crashing issues like that. It sounds like something specific to your system in some way shape or form. The scope of that battle is, however, likely pushing whatever the problem is over the edge. What that may be is not really easy for us to figure out. I will check with Charles and see if he has any specific ideas of what you can try. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CogNative Posted October 2, 2008 Share Posted October 2, 2008 Fair enough. Would like to have better multi-processor graphics but rather have a single processor system with QB that works. Good Luck Handihoc. "A great battle, but on a very big urban map with, after an hour, many many units in play. At this point the game slows to a crawl and often crashes..." Don't have Marines yet but I suspect my MacBook Pro 2.5 would not get very far in the Marines Campaign mission Battle for Objective Pooh. Hours of game fun in the deal with the CPU I have. Now if 'work' buys a Mac Pro for me next year... I demand multi-multi-processor support. CogNative Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlapHappy Posted October 2, 2008 Share Posted October 2, 2008 I've tried to squeeze some extra performance out of my rig for CMSF, with fairly limited results. The one scenario I actually have where performance is a real problem is City Ruins. This one is a back-breaker, not only because of the large number of units, but also because the map is BIG, with many many buildings. Since I have a quad-core, my CPU utilization is right at 25% which is basically maxing the one core it is using. That one core has a clock speed of 2.4 GHZ. It would be interesting to see if anyone has a ramped-up single core with high enough clock cycles to play this one with 25-30 FPS. In worst-case situations (read that as map views) I can manage about 13-14. It would also be interesting to see if it is theoretically possible to determine how much processor power it would take to achieve this without maxing the core. I can see this being an issue further down the road if there was a highly complex urban environment in the WWII CMX2 which tried to utilize a large map and company+ size unit numbers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cpl Steiner Posted October 3, 2008 Share Posted October 3, 2008 As I said in another thread, it won't help your single core if CM:SF doesn't utilise your graphics card to handle drawing the screen. If that one single core has to do the rendering as well as the logic, your computer is going to die in big scenarios. Does anyone know how to check if your graphics card is being used, or if OpenGL has dropped into the dreaded "Software Render Mode"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handihoc Posted October 3, 2008 Author Share Posted October 3, 2008 Yes, I seem to have opened two threads discussing the same topic. But this is obviously an issue for a significant amount of players - I'm surprised it wasn't picked up in testing. I have no idea how to check if my graphics card is being used, but that sounds like it might be the problem. My card (7950GT) has half a Gig of memory so it should be able to kick butt in CMSF as it has no problem handling other graphics-rich games, but of course, if it's not being used . . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigDork Posted October 4, 2008 Share Posted October 4, 2008 Having a similar issue with my quad core processor. CPU 3 is maxing out while the others are sitting back drinking a beer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlapHappy Posted October 5, 2008 Share Posted October 5, 2008 Rivatuner has tools which can identify whether or not your Graphics card is being utilized and to what extent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlapHappy Posted October 5, 2008 Share Posted October 5, 2008 On my part, Rivatuner did identify that OpenGL acceleration was taking place. You can also check FPS, Core Render and Core Shader usage and GPU memory usage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SgtMuhammed Posted October 5, 2008 Share Posted October 5, 2008 Yes, I seem to have opened two threads discussing the same topic. But this is obviously an issue for a significant amount of players - I'm surprised it wasn't picked up in testing. We can only test on the systems we have. This issue is really strange, my system is fairly low end compared to others and I have not seen anything like what many people have experienced. I design all my missions to run on my system so they should be fine on more up to date rigs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
handihoc Posted October 5, 2008 Author Share Posted October 5, 2008 It's a bit of a mystery, I agree. I've had to abandon the campaign (in your excellent Pooh battle, SgtM). I've made so many attempts to keep playing but I can only play a single WEGO turn now, then it crashes if I don't both a) save, and quit and reboot the whole game. Even then stability isn't guaranteed. I'm gonna have to content myself with some of the new single scenarios until this gets sorted. They are damn good battles in themselves, from what I've seen so far, but I'm itching to get back into that campaign and very frustrated at having a reasonably top end rig that's being trounced by machines from the Dark Ages! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bodkin Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 I've noticed that in the marines campaign I'm getting similar results to Handihoc, on the Pooh mission it gets a bit slow, but towards the end of the following mission where you have to take the valley with objectives Diego, Dora and Winky the game becomes a slideshow. The replay is fine and plays smooth and the camera is smooth in the command phase but the 'action phase' is completely shot, my core 2 Duo has one core maxed out. Just an update on this, if I close the game down, restart it and load the saved mission I get much better performance for a while, possible memory leak? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 Interesting result Bodkin. I don't think it indicates a memory leak in the game itself, though, since many of us are playing with a heck of a lot less RAM than Handihoc is. So if there was a leak we should have melted down long before him My suspicion is there is something going on at the system level, perhaps interplay between the drivers and the OS. It does sound like something is getting clogged up and being flushed out when the game is quit and restarted. Something like a memory leak outside of CM might produce that sort of thing, but so could a number of other things. We'll keep investigating. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 I'm closing this one down so we can concentrate effort in this thread. Please continue with the discussion over there. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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