low crossfire utilization fix

[Vielgus-Kutas]

this is a potential fix for people that are struggling with low crossfire utilization in games like bf3, bf4, arma3, etc... it might not work for everyone, depending on what the real issue is,

unparking all cpu cores, it has fixed low crossfire usage for me, this is a must tweak for all gamers, especially for crossfire users, ... core parking basically disables half of the cpu cores, reducing your cpu performance by 50% and causing a cpu bottleneck/low crossfire utilization

you can get the unpark utility here http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/Disable-CPU-Core-Parking-Utility

 

[XViper]

I could give this a try. I don't have a way to check if my setup is underutilized while in crossfire since I run the 64bit version of bf4. I have noticed that my fps has dropped to around 60-80 fps while before I had it running at 120fps.

 

[Meeho]

Core unparking reportedly brings several benefits to Win7 users.

How to do it manually:

- Go to Regedit (admin)
- Select Edit > Find... and find this key: " 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 "
- Within this key, there is a value called: " ValueMax " This value represents the % number of cores the system will park
- Change the value of " ValueMax" to 0 so that, it matches " ValueMin "
- You will have to find the key a few times and repeat the process for each time it is found - the number of instances will depend on the number of power profiles in your system. To do this go back up to Edit > Find Next.
- Do a full shutdown and power-off and cold-re-start.

 

[Armenius]

This fixed stuttering for a lot of things on my system with a single NVIDIA card as well. BF4 was unplayable for me at any settings until I unparked the cores on my CPU in Windows 7. Now I get great utilization across all 8 logical threads while playing BF4 multiplayer. It's old news, but it is good to bring up again for people who may not yet know about it.

 

[Tanquen]

But why are they parked in the first place? Power saving.

 

[Vielgus-Kutas]

But why are they parked in the first place? Power saving.

yeah, save $30 on energy, spend $800 on the system upgrades, thinking your cpu is a bottleneck

 

[Armenius]

But why are they parked in the first place? Power saving.

True, but the algorithm that is in place in Windows 7 is too aggressive. Unless utilization is consistently over 90% or so 7 will typically keep only 2 or 3 cores unlocked on a quad-core CPU with HyperThreading on or not. For games like BF4 that does a good job at multithreading and actually depends on it, this is bad for performance. I don't think the power savings of locking half of your CPU are going to be large enough to make a noticeable difference in power usage. PC gamers want to have the full capability of their system on tap when needed, but this feature in Windows 7 holds some of that performance back no matter how demanding the game you're running is.

 

[CaptNumbNutz]

This fixed stuttering for a lot of things on my system with a single NVIDIA card as well. BF4 was unplayable for me at any settings until I unparked the cores on my CPU in Windows 7. Now I get great utilization across all 8 logical threads while playing BF4 multiplayer. It's old news, but it is good to bring up again for people who may not yet know about it.

Yep. VERY old news.

Win8 handles core parking so much better than Win7 does. Core parking rarely affects games or other programs, but the Battlefield games seem to be sensitive to it. In fact, there was a microsoft optional update for the AMD FX processors for Windows 7 a year ago that addressed this specifically to help boost performance for the Bulldozer FX chips in all programs. Many of you may remember this issue from back then when people were reporting Win8 handled games better than Win7 on AMD machines. That left Intel cpu's with the issue, but it rarely affected them. However, BF4 seems to change that trend.

Unparking the CPU cores in Win7 helps tremendously with BF4. It doesn't necessarily fix the crossfire and SLI issues. DICE has broken/fixed/broken again multi-gpu support in this game, especially since patches released in late december.

Core unparking does little to nothing in Win8 at this time. I have run BF3 and BF4 on both Win7 and Win 8.1. Unparking cores on Win7 helped drastically with stuttering in Bf4, but nothing on Win8.

 

[Vielgus-Kutas]

not old news to people who are having problems and looking for solutions, like i was.. for last few weeks

i haven't tried to unpark cores on win8 but i can tell that the same bottleneck still exists there, in arma3 on win8.1 my crossfire utilization was also 30-50%, so whatever they say they have improved, they failed or they lied

 

[Domini]

not old news to people who are having problems and looking for solutions, like i was.. for last few weeks

i haven't tried to unpark cores on win8 but i can tell that the same bottleneck still exists there, in arma3 on win8.1 my crossfire utilization was also 30-50%, so whatever they say they have improved, they failed or they lied

Isn't ARMA very CPU dependent though?

 

[Vielgus-Kutas]

Isn't ARMA very CPU dependent though?

that's what people say... i have a 6core xeon, so i was pretty sure my cpu wasn't a bottleneck, and i had the low crossfire utilization issue on win7 and win8.1 , now it's at 100% utilization and my fps has doubled and tripled in some areas,

 

[Hotar9978]

Here's a similar program from the creator of process lasso: http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

I use it on my 3930k and l5639 but I was never having issues from the start, I guess preventative measure of sorts. There was also no power consumption differences as I far as I can tell from the killawatt reading.