Force core affinity

[Naywyn]

Forcing games to run on 1 core is very helpful for some games (especially old games)
Would like to see this feature

[Zefar]

That is up to the Developers of the game. Not Steam which is a program made by Valve.

[Naywyn]

How's it a Developers problem?
I mean i can make it run on 1 core in task manager and i can also make it do that automatically with a bat file in normal games.
In Steam, since you either have to launch it through Steam or a Steam shortcut you can't really create a bat file that does it automatically.
So i think this could be something that can be done.

[Bane Silvermoon]

Naywyn is right. I don't know that the way steam is built and launches programs, if it can properly access core affinity once it's running. But there are relatively easy work-arounds to make this happen. The simplest is to set launch arguments on steam itself to set core affinity on steam, as it will then pass that affinity to any game it launches.

But it would be epic if you could set launch options, or if there was even a specific property section for this, so that you could easily set each game up within steam to run on specific cores. It's a pain having to manually create command lines for everything to do that.

I used to just have a steam file with affinity settings that was in my startyp folder, so steam always launched on cores 2-6, but occasionally you'll run into a game that doesn't like not having access to a certain core, so I eventually switched back to running it normally. If you could specify on a game by game basis, it would solve that issue.

[Bane Silvermoon]

CPU Core affinity from launch options

It's fairly simple to setup a steam executable with specified CPU core affinity. But occasionally you run across a game that doesn't play nice when not allowed to access certain cores. I'm aware that there are many different ways to make this happen with batch file command lines, or even running individual games off of batch shortcuts, as non-steam games. But I'm wondering if there is some simple solution that I haven't been able to work out within steam.

Anybody know any functional method to add core affinity arguments to a games launch options? It would be fantastic if this could be set differently for different games from within steam.

[Cordon_Black]

Im not realy an expert but does´nt it depend on the game itself and the game engine?

[Bane Silvermoon]

The number of threads a game generates and runs is determined in the build of the software, yes. But how those threads are distributed among the processor cores is completely managed by the operating system.

Most games these days have quite a large number of threads to be dispersed. Ideally, with none of the individual threads requiring a large amount of processing power by itself. The less processing power those individual threads use, the better a program multi-cores, as the heaviest ones can be loaded into separate cores.

[br0ken™]

in launch options you can add -threads 2,3,4 i used to put 7 but i really only play csgo which even 4 is unnecessary for the things I have read and heard. but I could be wrong as well you can look more into that if that is what you are looking for. good luck =)

[Bane Silvermoon]

Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for. Will play around with that. Though I wonder if it is specific to certain games. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think launch options are specific to the game engine being used.