Jump to content

CPU parked cores causing our stutters FIX inside up to 8 core CPU

dvrocc

By dvrocc
in General Discussion

 Share

Recommended Posts

dvrocc

dvrocc

Posted
Posted (edited)

TL:DR if you suffer from stutters this may or may not help you.

 

I sorted my annoying stutters and created a smoother game, these stutters happened not at random times but when my quad core CPU would power down the unused cores when not really needed while having pretty much anything CPU intensive going this is called "Parked" cores in the Windows 7 OS.

 

The issue with this is that when the CPU "parked" a core or two via the OS (windows 7) those would never came back on-line so to speak which was causing the other active cores to pick up the slack and if they were in the process of doing something else it would have to wait its turn to pass through the "on-line" cores which was causing my stutters, see where i am going?

 

For some reason SWTOR does use two out of four of my CPU cores but its not the ones you think, core 1 and 3 were handling everything that I was tossing that direction while core 2 and 4 were parked and they never came back on-line basically being worthless, even in full all on "High Performance Power Plan" mode maxed everything.

 

Now the goodies, unparking those parked cores levels out the playing field dramatically and my game is smooth as silk not much to any stutters. I use a tool called "ParkControl" to make all four cores handle everything more equally so to speak which really smoothed things out, this tool doesn't run all the time so you can load it up when you are ready to run a full screen game like swtor for example then simply turn it off when you are done.

 

1. need to confirm the PC you use is "parking" those cores while gaming, first thing is to bring up the resource monitor, Start > Run > type 'Resource Monitor' and when that is open click on the CPU tab move this to one side of the screen so you will be able to have swtor in "window mode" and still be able to see the resource monitor.

 

1a. start swtor and put in window mode, resize the screen just enough so you can see the resource monitor's CPU section on the right side of the monitor then move that toon some place active like fleet and look at the cores and see which ones are parked, it should look like "CPU1 - Parked" if you have parked cores while running swtor then you most likely have those annoying stutters.

 

3. go here https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/ or Google "ParkControl" if you are worried about bad links.

 

Also more info on Core Parking.

http://allisterb.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/the-saga-of-muticore-cpus-core-parking.html

 

You can read the above websites to get a better understanding it will take like 3 minutes and another 2 to download and get the software up and running, there is no tweaks or adjustments other then the sliders provided in the tool and you only need to load the tool when you are gaming just make sure you close swtor completely so it will take advantage of all the cores when you start it up again.

Edited by dvrocc
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Slurmez

Slurmez

Posted
Posted

Bitraider is also responsible for a huge amount of problems with this game, those who dont know (as I didnt) Bitraider is what the game uses to stream and is a huge sack of crap, literally half the problems with the game stem from this garbage software. Removing it resolved stutters on a high end pc that shouldnt have been having problems at all.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=6693353#post6693353

Link to comment
Share on other sites
MadDutchman

MadDutchman

Posted
Posted

This thread made me all excited for a moment. I'm running an AMD Phenom II X6 @ 2.8 GHz and I occasionally see stutters, particularly in my stronghold of all places.

 

Sadly, none of my cores are parked, swtor just doesn't know how to use 6 processors properly.

 

Now looking into bitraider to see if it has wormed it's way into my ancient install.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Icykill_

Icykill_

Posted
Posted

I've been playing around with parkcontrol for a few months now... I have an i7 4770k... I can say that the game seems to "run" smoother... But it also adds a little bit of lag... I'm not sure why... Maybe because it's an Intel CPU... But the program is also designed for intel

Anyway, the extra lag can be a killer in pvp... So I would only use this program if not PVPing...

What I have discovered is an even bigger problem than CPU parking is the amount of RAM and reserved virtual memory the game uses... It also uses 2 threads... The first will nearly always hit close to 2gb ram and the second 1-1.5 gb... This happens fairly quickly and will continue to go up till it caps the games maximum limit of ram...then virtual memory starts to go up too... I find I have to either restart after 3-4 hours of play or use this program I have that that resets the virtual memory... Otherwise I get increasing amount of lag in pvp the longer I play

I have 8gb of ram and run no background apps or services that aren't needed... Basically a "stripped" down system designed only for gaming

I also run 3 intel 520 SSDs... One for OS, One for Games, One for virtual memory

I am going to test 16gb to see if that improves it... But I doubt it will... And even if it does, the game should not require this much ram to run properly...

I know it is limited to 2 threads because it is 32bit, but they need to have an option to run in 64bit because a large majority of systems now run that and running 4 threads should theoretically improve the games performance...

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Zoom_VI

Zoom_VI

Posted
Posted
I've been playing around with parkcontrol for a few months now... I have an i7 4770k... I can say that the game seems to "run" smoother... But it also adds a little bit of lag... I'm not sure why... Maybe because it's an Intel CPU... But the program is also designed for intel

Anyway, the extra lag can be a killer in pvp... So I would only use this program if not PVPing...

What I have discovered is an even bigger problem than CPU parking is the amount of RAM and reserved virtual memory the game uses... It also uses 2 threads... The first will nearly always hit close to 2gb ram and the second 1-1.5 gb... This happens fairly quickly and will continue to go up till it caps the games maximum limit of ram...then virtual memory starts to go up too... I find I have to either restart after 3-4 hours of play or use this program I have that that resets the virtual memory... Otherwise I get increasing amount of lag in pvp the longer I play

I have 8gb of ram and run no background apps or services that aren't needed... Basically a "stripped" down system designed only for gaming

I also run 3 intel 520 SSDs... One for OS, One for Games, One for virtual memory

I am going to test 16gb to see if that improves it... But I doubt it will... And even if it does, the game should not require this much ram to run properly...

I know it is limited to 2 threads because it is 32bit, but they need to have an option to run in 64bit because a large majority of systems now run that and running 4 threads should theoretically improve the games performance...

 

I have been running have had seen zero change. Also it cannot cause lag, lag is a product of you server connection which has nothing to do with you cores.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Zoom_VI

Zoom_VI

Posted
Posted
Bitraider is also responsible for a huge amount of problems with this game, those who dont know (as I didnt) Bitraider is what the game uses to stream and is a huge sack of crap, literally half the problems with the game stem from this garbage software. Removing it resolved stutters on a high end pc that shouldnt have been having problems at all.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=6693353#post6693353

 

Unless I am mistaken Bioware removed bitraider with one of their recent patches.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Icykill_

Icykill_

Posted
Posted (edited)
I have been running have had seen zero change. Also it cannot cause lag, lag is a product of you server connection which has nothing to do with you cores.

 

Usually I would agree... But if I turn off the program the lag disappears... I know the program maybe using resources that could add artificial lag in your own system... But if you don't see a difference then it is unlikely

So I can only go on process of elimination to trouble shoot problems... That is the result I got

Edited by Icykill_
Link to comment
Share on other sites
MeNaCe-NZ

MeNaCe-NZ

Posted
Posted
I also run 3 intel 520 SSDs... One for OS, One for Games, One for virtual memory

 

Slightly off topic but this reminded me of something I had intended to try soon and that was for a swapless system ( i.e. no pagefile ).

 

I had intended to go to 32GB to achieve this ( though I believe 16GB will do the trick ) so now I'm wondering if many people have given it a go and what SWToR performance is like as a result?

 

Just occured to me because I noted your extra SSD and was curious why you would go that route instead of extra ram and no pagefile which had me thinking perhaps I am missing something on the topic and would rather know now before putting more money into ram.

 

As to the OP I too would be interested to note if anyone has had any noticeable benefit from intel CPUs in this regard. I don't really notice any stutter to speak of other than a bit like on fleet it does seem to gitter a wee bit ( seems to go away if I turn down/off shadows ) and also those flying manta ray things on Alderan seem to induce quite a bit of stutter also.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Icykill_

Icykill_

Posted
Posted
Slightly off topic but this reminded me of something I had intended to try soon and that was for a swapless system ( i.e. no pagefile ).

 

I had intended to go to 32GB to achieve this ( though I believe 16GB will do the trick ) so now I'm wondering if many people have given it a go and what SWToR performance is like as a result?

 

Just occured to me because I noted your extra SSD and was curious why you would go that route instead of extra ram and no pagefile which had me thinking perhaps I am missing something on the topic and would rather know now before putting more money into ram.

 

As to the OP I too would be interested to note if anyone has had any noticeable benefit from intel CPUs in this regard. I don't really notice any stutter to speak of other than a bit like on fleet it does seem to gitter a wee bit ( seems to go away if I turn down/off shadows ) and also those flying manta ray things on Alderan seem to induce quite a bit of stutter also.

 

I used the 3rd SSD because I had a spare one... I have also tried on previous systems to run no page file while running 24GB memory... It would cause the occasional blue screen of death and some other miner, but annoying issues...

I'll be installing another 8GB to my current 8GB system and testing both setups... But I expect to see little difference in actual game performance

Link to comment
Share on other sites
OwenBrooks

OwenBrooks

Posted
Posted (edited)
I know it is limited to 2 threads because it is 32bit, but they need to have an option to run in 64bit because a large majority of systems now run that and running 4 threads should theoretically improve the games performance...

 

This isn't totally correct, the game will create easily 20+ threads across the two 32bit processes, but it will be limited to 3/4 cores edit - least for intel cpu , amd maybe slightly different due to the core architecture and is likely 6

 

Start task manager, right mouse click on the task bar and select "start task manager" , then click on the performance tab and then click on the resource monitor, then on the CPU tab when the game is running look for swtor.exe (will be 2 of them) and have a look at the number of threads running on the cores

 

I have also tried on previous systems to run no page file while running 24GB memory... It would cause the occasional blue screen of death and some other miner, but annoying issues...

 

There must be an underlying reason for the blue screens , my setup here with 16Gb can/does operate just fine with no page file on Win 7 (did so for over 6 months, however there is no real reason/benfit to disable the pagefile on Win 7 for most people (even using SSDs not so much now either)

Edited by OwenBrooks
Link to comment
Share on other sites
OwenBrooks

OwenBrooks

Posted
Posted (edited)

There is likely a simpler answer ,As the Op has said there is a known performance impact when cores park and unpark , removing the ability to stop the core parking removes that performance impact, it will use more power as the powersave feature will no longer be working but on a desktop or a laptop plugged into mains, this isn't really an issue.

 

Edit - Read this - http://allisterb.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/the-saga-of-muticore-cpus-core-parking.html and remember this game is DirectX 9 , which is why installing the following linked directx redist (even on win 8) also helps by ensuring the D9Ex exist - http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=8109

 

D3D9Ex - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee890072(v=vs.85).aspx

Edited by OwenBrooks
Link to comment
Share on other sites
phattisimo

phattisimo

Posted
Posted
you don't need a tool(app) to accomplish unparking cores it's a registry setting for windows...do a google search for unparking cores/ maximizing bios for gaming (turning off some energy saving features in bios gives perf boost as well)...set windows power settings to high perf also helps...it's a DX9 game (read 32bit) so basically its trying to run high end sports cars but really only has the capabilities for a lawnmower...pray for a DX12/Mantle fix
Link to comment
Share on other sites
BrintoSFJ

BrintoSFJ

Posted
Posted
you don't need a tool(app) to accomplish unparking cores it's a registry setting for windows...do a google search for unparking cores/ maximizing bios for gaming (turning off some energy saving features in bios gives perf boost as well)...set windows power settings to high perf also helps...it's a DX9 game (read 32bit) so basically its trying to run high end sports cars but really only has the capabilities for a lawnmower...pray for a DX12/Mantle fix

About the registry editing, it is pretty risky for non tech savvy person. using this application is better choice for everyone.

And agreed about the dx9, wish we would at least have dx11.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.