What is CPU Affinity?

Started by Koosharem, January 17, 2012, 06:03:29 PM

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Koosharem

You guessed it -- I'm a (brand) newbee!!  Just downloaded Process Lasso 3-4 days ago and still feeling my way around.  For the most part everything I have read that was downloaded with the program has been very helpful.  But I didn't find anything on this "Affinity" thing.

Also,  I couldn't find the customary FAQ department here on the Forum -- I suspect my question might be answered there . . .

I think I've found a great process manager for Windows and, I'm eager to learn how to understand & use it!  :)

Jeremy Collake

Welcome :). CPU Affinity is simply the core(s) that the process is allowed to use. The documentation is lacking in places, and does make assumptions at times about prior technical knowledge.
Software Engineer. Bitsum LLC.

gamesturbator

Just to give an example. A lot of games seem to improperly utilize multi-core CPUs. I was having an issue with Shattered Horizon where things just SLOWED down and my frames per second dropped like a stone, resulting in horrible stuttering in my gameplay. Futuremark told me to disable core 0 and sure enough it fixed the problem (no idea why). Some games are better off being assigned a single core  (Bitsum could probably explain why better than I can), especially games that predate quad cores systems.  So say you are using a quad core cpu, with Lasso you can just right-click the game's process and select to have it run off any number of the 4 cores. Hope this helps.

Koosharem

My thanks to both gamesturbator & bitsum.support.  Your posts made it all very clear.  I'm still in the "stone age" with a single-core Pentium4! 

Keefa

As I recall, the Pentium 4 has Hyper-Threading, so you're not completely safe from assigning affinities, either. ;)