Improving erratic game play

[grandpa]

Hello Everyone. Not long ago, when I was in the midst of game play boredom, I popped in one of my older games, namely Anno 1503. Well, my little animals, my boat, everything in the game was moving 100 miles per hour, to the point I could not play it.

The same was happening to my Civ V game, except it was hardly playing at all.
So, while trying to find a solution for my Anno game, a nice person (whom I cannot remember) gave me a little trick that has helped me emmensely.

It seems that with all the new technology of multiple cores, that the game does not know how to use them. So, it gets all screwy.

If you are having any such problem, you can try this, and maybe....just maybe, it will help.


start the game.......press Control, Alt, Delete, and bring up the task manager screen.

find the game you are running, and right click it.....a new screen will come up, with one of the headings being "SET AFFINITY".

Click this, and you will see all of your cores..zero thru whatever. In my case I have two cores, ZERO and ONE. Select only one core...in otherwords, reduce it to ONE CORE, and close the task manager...and return to your game..and see if it did anything to help.

I have had such good results, I felt it important to share with you.

Have a great day, and happy gaming.


CHEERS!

[ODaly]

Yeah, that's a solid trick, especially with so many multi-core processors around and so few games capable of utilizing multiple cores.

A trick I came across while trying to solve performance issues when alt-tabbing is to open the task manager, then right-click on the program and select "go to process" then right click the highlighted process and "set priority" to either "above-normal" or "high". A warning box will appear, but is safely ignored.

EDIT: This will need to be re-done every time the program is started, though I'm sure there is a way to somehow set the default priority to a higher level.