Does changing the CPU thread to "high priority" make any difference to game performance?

[Vinz Clortho]

I hear this tip given for lots of games but I have never noticed much of a difference?

[Trollhammer]

No, like every other trick of the same kind they're nothing else than snake oil.

[Illusion of Progress]

Only if your background tasks are consuming enough CPU to be leaving you with too little CPU for both those tasks and the game, in which case you should ideally (key word, I know) be looking at addressing that properly with a replacement. Else, cut down on what you're running.

Your CPU already performs the best it can though, so, no, it's not a "free performance" toggle. It just means the CPU will stave of low priority tasks in favor of higher priority ones. Again, this gains you nothing if you're not losing performance to that to begin with.

[_I_]

high priority may put the game over input and other needed tasks
best to leave it at normal

[Ghost Robertson]

I kind of think it's why they came with Intel 12 gen, The economic cores are supposed to do the basic work while the performance cores do the hard work.

I think by 13th gen and maybe a decent windows 11 update maybe they can take good advantage of this idea.

I'm not sure if 12th gen has made a big difference yet.

[Heretic]

It can help under some situations. MS is not a realtime OS, so raising priority may allow the process higher priority during interupts. However, it should be fine at defaults. If you're having problems then maybe look at driver issues/latencies.

[A&A]

I tested this setting on Pentium J2900 (Power limit 3W, which is very terrible for 4 cores CPU)

*The test*
I opened Quake III (Open Arena) and l joined in voice chat in discord with my friend. 2-3 minutes later, the voice chat is dead, l couldn't hear my friend, so l was looking for solution and l had two options. The first one was to use the browser, but l didn't like this and the second one was to set discord on high priority. Does it work? At least l could stay in the voice chat without this problem.

The answer is that there is a change, but it depends on what processor you have and what load you have. If you have dual core CPU, probably this will be a good option.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

What has helped is sometimes lowering the proof other running apps. For example if I launch Red Dead Redemption 2, once it's at the in-game main menu I could then switch to Task Manager and change Priority for all those extra tasks associated with it; Rockstar Launcher, GUIOverlay, Steam WebHelper... and set those all to Low Priority. It can help a bit.

Setting a game to High Priority oesnt help and often can cause some odd effects such as stutters and such. I would just ensure that when you enter Windows OS, bring up Task Manager and when needing to see it, Minimize it, but set Task Managers Priority to Real-time. Everything else should be on Normal or Low depending on what it is exactly.

Setting Task Manager to Real-time helps ensure thag if something else ties up the cpu way too much or causing issues like making the Windows OS gui go out to lunch... allowing Task Manager to.still be very responsive despite something else having a ridiculous cpu usage %

[Overseer]

Process priority is also way too often misunderstood. Because the scheduler has to ensure that every process receives CPU time. So the more processes are running the more computational power you will need. Messing with priority won't help there.
Base priority is also just that. As during execution the priority can receive a boost for multiple reasons. And that includes a boost for a process that has been stalled in the background for too long. And since a game will be in your main focus it will benefit from the most priority boosts, while other programs in the background, like a chat may fall behind and benefit from a higher priority than the game.
One of the best examples for this is live streaming. Where the streaming software in the background but with a higher priority than the game will deliver a better stream.

[Meatball]

I always thought this was a thing back then on Windows 98/XP. I had a Pentium II 300mhz CPU and the high priority-tweak was kind of the last resort.xDD

[Snow]

Originally posted by Illusion of Progress:

Only if your background tasks are consuming enough CPU to be leaving you with too little CPU for both those tasks and the game, in which case you should ideally (key word, I know) be looking at addressing that properly with a replacement.

^ this

When I was running modern games on an old CPU, as CPU usage was close to 100%, CPU didn't always have enough time to process USB inputs, so I had to lower the game's priority. This is the type of use cases for that feature. Any modern CPU should have enough CPU threads to process a game and all other stuff simultaneously.