Matrix Games Forums

I have a quad core (i7-2670QM) laptop that is hyperthreaded and has 16GB of RAM. Currently I set it to -cpu4 and it seems the 4th core is running higher than the others when I check the task manager. Normally I have the power settings of the laptop set to a quieter mode hence the CPU is not running in full turbo. I don't notice any slow down with WITP.

Knowing that I have tons of "firepower" in my laptop, what command line settings to force more than 1 core being used in the game? Do I set -cpu1 -cpu2 -cpu3 -cpu4 together?

-cpu4 means use CPU #4, not use 4x CPU. To use all available processors, just don't specify a cpu parameter in the command line.

WITP is an older program not designed for multiple processors and it has been found to work better with one processor on some systems. It varies depending on your configuration so experiment and use the command line parameters that work best for you.

The details are all in the "WhatsNew.pdf" file that comes with the game.

ORIGINAL: Reg

-cpu4 means use CPU #4, not use 4x CPU. To use all available processors, just don't specify a cpu parameter in the command line.

WITP is an older program not designed for multiple processors and it has been found to work better with one processor on some systems. It varies depending on your configuration so experiment and use the command line parameters that work best for you.

The details are all in the "WhatsNew.pdf" file that comes with the game.

I read that in the WhatsNew.pdf. Even though I am in IT, I was confused after. Removing the command line setting makes WITP slower so I just have to pick a cpu# and things work smoothly now.

It's a bug with DirectX. Some of the older calls only work reliably in a single CPU system. It's a problem with older game engines (when this game engine was created, multiple core CPUs were very rare). It looks like the solution for most game developers is to lock you to one core and the user never knows otherwise.

We discovered the problem happens on some multicore computers, but not others. There are two sources to the problem, one is with most Intel multicore switching hardware (the hardware that determines what part of a program goes on what core) and the other source is with the video card driver. AMD processors don't have the flaw in the switching hardware and they can handle the DirectX bug OK. However, almost all newer video cards hiccup on the DirectX bug. When we released the game, about 1/2 of video cards manifested the bug.

Video card manufacturers are not motivated to do anything about it because it mostly only crops up with older program designs that use DirectX. Though I think I saw it recently on my "day job" where a customer had something like a six core computer, though it may have been a virus scanner problem in that case. They were out of the country so we were trying to troubleshoot remotely, which always has its headaches.

Bill