Avoid Threadripper Reboots For Switching Game/Creator Mode

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rgMekanic

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Many games don't know what to make of the massive core count from AMD's Threadripper processors. AMD fortunately thought of that and added "game" and "creator" modes to Ryzen Master, which disables half of the cores as to not confuse games, but doing so forces a reboot of your PC. HardForum member tangoseal shows us a better way to get the cores under control without rebooting using Process Lasso. By using Process Lasso you can set CPU affinity for each application permanently.

Many thanks to tangoseal for finding this, as well as making a great video with the how to. You can get Process Lasso here.
 
been using Process Lasso for 2 years, best 40 dollars worth spent on this impressive app.
 
I have not looked at this application myself, but you can already kind of do this with the windows task manager, click on Processes, right click on any process and "Set Affinity". Granted I don't think this will make it permanent. But for those wishing to try this without installing anything, this may be an option.
 
I've been looking for this for a long time. Fortunately, it has only been a few games that have trouble: the Farcrys mostly and some other Ubi games. Witchers 2 and 3, and the new Tomb Raiders also crash on many cores, but they have launchers so you can set the affinity on them without killing them. Still, it's so annoying to have to reboot to play a Farcry game, because launching them with start /affinity from the command prompt doesn't work on them.

These guys have the worst marketing because even if you've searched several times over the last few years, you still may not come across their link in Google.

Thanks!
 
Maybe one day disconnected from reality suits will stop telling developers to make games for 2008 cpu's.

Now to ponder buying Process Lasso and see if it brings some of those dead games I have back to life. :)
 
Game/Creative mode does more than this, and there is no getting around rebooting to make those changes.
 
Azphira said:
Maybe one day disconnected from reality suits will stop telling developers to make games for 2008 cpu's.

Now to ponder buying Process Lasso and see if it brings some of those dead games I have back to life. :)
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God help you if you're game requires anything newer than SSE2.
 
Kaizer said:
I have not looked at this application myself, but you can already kind of do this with the windows task manager, click on Processes, right click on any process and "Set Affinity". Granted I don't think this will make it permanent. But for those wishing to try this without installing anything, this may be an option.
Click to expand...

Yep, the FREE option is to right click your task and set the CPU Affinity. Now, if a game crashes right away and you can't back out to Taskman, then helper programs like this might be worth it.

Sadly my i5 doesn't have enough threads currently to where I have to deal with it. :(
 
You can just put
start /affinity 555 someprogram.exe
or
start /affinity 0x0555 someprogram.exe
in a bat file and run that (affinity).

Personally I have an Autohotkey script, does pretty much the same as Process Lasso without the pretty GUI.
 
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BloodyIron said:
I have my doubts about whether this issue affects Linux games.
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it's more likely that windows load balancing is the problem with it trying to spread the game evenly across 32 threads. where as if i remember correctly in linux if a program/game requires 1 thread the program only uses 1 thread if it uses 4 it'll use 4 and linux doesn't try to load balance it across all the threads available but it's been a long ass time since i've used linux so maybe that has changed.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
it's more likely that windows load balancing is the problem with it trying to spread the game evenly across 32 threads. where as if i remember correctly in linux if a program/game requires 1 thread the program only uses 1 thread if it uses 4 it'll use 4 and linux doesn't try to load balance it across all the threads available but it's been a long ass time since i've used linux so maybe that has changed.
Click to expand...
No OS can force the breakup of tasks into threads. The program has to explicitly ask for the creation of every thread it wants. Of course, vendor runtime libraries may employ additional threads but that's besides the point. If you wrote a program and you don't make it thread aware, it can only ever use one thread (the process thread.) If it asks for another thread, it will get that the same way under Windows or Linux.

There may be differences in the way cores get threads assigned; that's part of the drivers AMD provides, but to a degree also part of the way the OS schedules things, but that has nothing to do with the creation of threads.

In essence, you can not break up a single-threaded piece of code into threads automatically. You can run a static analyzer that can help you make decisions about changing your code to be better threaded, but no OS can do that on the fly, at least no consumer OS.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
it's more likely that windows load balancing is the problem with it trying to spread the game evenly across 32 threads. where as if i remember correctly in linux if a program/game requires 1 thread the program only uses 1 thread if it uses 4 it'll use 4 and linux doesn't try to load balance it across all the threads available but it's been a long ass time since i've used linux so maybe that has changed.
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Please don't call logical core for threads.. thy are NOT the same thing you have way more than 32 theads in your system.. and whatever you are saying about linux sounds like home made BS but im not a linux user. but i believe than there are many diffrent CPU schedulers for linux so making an ultimative claim like that seem pretty wrong.
 
If it is just 1 or 2 games you can do the set affinity thing as mentioned you can even google it. You can even put the file in auto startup. so you would not have to execute it each time you want to launch the game.
 
Love Project Lasso and ParkControl. Great little convenience apps.


Edit:

SvenBent said:
Please don't call logical core for threads.. thy are NOT the same thing you have way more than 32 theads in your system.. and whatever you are saying about linux sounds like home made BS but im not a linux user. but i believe than there are many diffrent CPU schedulers for linux so making an ultimative claim like that seem pretty wrong.
Click to expand...

Just a quick blurb on why we don't call threads cores, or even "logical" cores:

Threads are OS/software level. I can develop applications that are explicitly multi-threaded in which every single one of those threads are run on a single physical execution unit.

The OS usually handles the business of assigning execution resources (cores), but in this case the OP is using a program to do that manually.
 
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sirmonkey1985 said:
it's more likely that windows load balancing is the problem with it trying to spread the game evenly across 32 threads. where as if i remember correctly in linux if a program/game requires 1 thread the program only uses 1 thread if it uses 4 it'll use 4 and linux doesn't try to load balance it across all the threads available but it's been a long ass time since i've used linux so maybe that has changed.
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Umm, no.
 
Nope, Prototype is fundamentally broken, alone in the dark still doesn't work and using lasso I discovered Elder Scrolls Online is a carburetor, feed it too much core and multi gpu gas and it floods out.



Edit: AITD is not crashing from cores, it's most likely crashing from securom thinking I am stealing the game because my OS is too new.
 
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You can add Lost Planet 2 to that list, it barfs when you go over 6 cores (I'm told you have to limit them in the bios rather than just affinity).
 
AFAIK this is the correct behaviour in Linux. I haven't seen otherwise just yet.

sirmonkey1985 said:
it's more likely that windows load balancing is the problem with it trying to spread the game evenly across 32 threads. where as if i remember correctly in linux if a program/game requires 1 thread the program only uses 1 thread if it uses 4 it'll use 4 and linux doesn't try to load balance it across all the threads available but it's been a long ass time since i've used linux so maybe that has changed.
Click to expand...
 
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