CPU Affinity Setting - Should I or Shouldn't I?

[mlwhitt]

Hey guys first time poster, long time reader ; )

I have dual-boxed in the past using two separate PCs but recently I decided to actually go with two instances of WoW on the same PC so I can use my second PC for my 70s to power level my duos thru instances when needed.

I am running a Toshiba X205-S7483 which is a Dual-Core 1.83ghz with 2Gb ram. I am running one instance of Warcraft on each of the two drives I have. My question is would it benefit me to set the affinity on each instance of Warcraft to one of the CPUs each? Right now I am getting around 30fps on each copy. I have both running at 800x600. The first instance is set with high detail while the clone is set to minimum specs.

I guess I could just play with it and see, but I thought I would check and see if anyone else has played with it before and see what they thought about it.

Thanks in advance.

[Eteocles]

They made it autoassign affinities somehow in a recent patch, but just for Dual-Cores, so I'd recommend trying running 2 normally first, then running 2 and manually choosing affinities, see which works better if there's any difference at all; I doubt there will be though lol

[mlwhitt]

They made it autoassign affinities somehow in a recent patch, but just for Dual-Cores, so I'd recommend trying running 2 normally first, then running 2 and manually choosing affinities, see which works better if there's any difference at all; I doubt there will be though lol

Thank you for the advice. I appreciate it. I will keep it as is. 30FPS isn't bad, but I am used to running at 60.

[Eteocles]

I use an Athlon x64 dual-core processor myself and run 3 instances of wow on the same comp, fps gets a lil choppy but otherwise runs great without fiddling with core affinities; if you do have issues, try setting /console maxfps 30 or 35 to the back alts and /console maxfps 60(or higher) on your main, works awesomely for me, alts run fine at 35fps and my main gets upwards of 64-80fps in most non-shattrath places

[Mith]

I run a triscreen setup (top half is split into quarter screens, bottom half is a single screen for my main) and i have the top two screens nerfed on gfx, bottom window on balls out gfx. Top half of the screen is set to one processor, bottom to another. I noticed no serious FPS boosts. The only thing that i did notice was that when mousing from one of the quarter screens to the other, there is usually no "mouse hang" when crossing the border. Since the bottom screen is on a different core, there is always a slight hang when crossing the screen's equator.

When i have the processor affinity set to auto i get mouse hang at every border regardless. Anyone else notice this?

[mlwhitt]

Last night I tried running both instances of WoW running from the same directory instead of off two different drivers and found that my performance went way up. Actually running from the same directory I managed to run both windows at max detail in 800x600 with average of 55fps. Seems to me at least with my setup the factor was running from the different drives for some reason. I would have thought that running from the same directory would have hurt my performance instead of helping it, but from my testing last night that wasn't the case.

[Mith]

Minor update on this topic:

Last night i upped the bar a little and graduated to quad boxing all on one machine w/ a "goldeneye 4-player" screen setup. Just out of curiosity i decided to not specify processor affinity on anyof the windows and to my surprise i was getting significant boosts to FPS on all 4 screens (only 1 of the three "background" screens was capped at 15fps, rest were crusing at 30+) with my main's screen capped at 60 from Vsync. All graphics are maxed with the exceptionof the resolution of course. The only down side is that load/draw times seem to be a little longer in some areas, but once they are rendered the game is smooth.

My setup:

Core2Duo 2.6ghz

2g DDR

EVGA GeForce 8800GTX

[Chorizotarian]

Last night I tried running both instances of WoW running from the same directory instead of off two different drivers and found that my performance went way up. Actually running from the same directory I managed to run both windows at max detail in 800x600 with average of 55fps. Seems to me at least with my setup the factor was running from the different drives for some reason. I would have thought that running from the same directory would have hurt my performance instead of helping it, but from my testing last night that wasn't the case.

I had 5 chars running from 2 directories, both on the same drive, and things were running great. Then yesterday I decided to create 5 separate copies of WoW to minimize settings file collisions between my clones, and I got much worse performance. My fps dropped on my main from a comfortable 60 to often in the 45 range, and I started getting runaway clones. My working theory is that by having 5 separate copies of WoW.exe I'm causing cache collisions since the system thinks it needs to treat the executables as separate.