NFS Hot Pursuit: CPU affinity issues, bad porting?

[ojas]

Hey everyone.

Made a major overhaul to my Core 2 system, so right now it can play anything maxed out. However Hot Pursuit's giving me issues. Here are the relevant specs:

Core 2 Quad Q8400 (2.66 GHz)
GTX 560
8GB DDR3-1333 @ 8-8-8-24
Monitor resolution: 1024x768

Now it's definitely not a GPU issue, GPU load is well below 100%. I can run BF3 on ultra, so Hot Pursuit is pudding. I've got the latest patch on it and all, drivers updated, BIOS updated...everything. I had a 9600GT before, i thought that was causing the problem.

Thing is that the game always drops to 40-50 fps (or lower) whenever there are vehicles on the screen. When it's an empty road it hits a game imposed max of 60 fps.

I was reading online, there was talk of setting CPU affinity. so i messed around with that. With one core i get 17 fps, with 2 cores around 30-40, with all 4 i get 40-60. Problem is that i have to manually do this every time, by default it hits lows of 20-something.

Even turned threaded optimisation "on" from "auto" in the Nvidia CP, still isn't working on its own.

Does anyone know a fix? or is just a game issue i have to live with?

 

[Supernova1138]

At that low a resolution, you are running into a CPU bottleneck. Your graphics card is waiting for your CPU to feed it data, hence the lowered framerates. Your two options for fixing this, are either bump up the resolution if your monitor can support it, giving the graphics card more work to do, the 560 is capable of gaming at much higher resolutions easily. Your other option aside from new computer, or new CPU at the very least is to get a good cooler and try overclocking your CPU up to around 3GHz or so, that should alleviate the bottleneck.

 

[ojas]

Well, i used 1280x1024, and there's no difference. Still the same. I thought it was a CPU bottleneck, but...i dunno man my specs (even the cpu) are well above the recommended requirements for the game.

actually i'll rephrase that. It IS a CPU bottleneck, but it seems to be an artificial one, in the sense that it's a game problem and not really a CPU problem in itself.

And the fact that no other game displays such issues...i get 60 to 85 fps (adaptive vsync, 85 Hz refresh rate) with ease on most games.

what about that affinity problem? It seems incapable of using all 4 cores on its own, i have to manually set it to 2 cores and then back to 4 cores to get it to use all of them. Otherwise it just uses one mostly.

iirc the latest patch added multicore support.

 

[Supernova1138]

Sadly, a lot of games do not have great multithreading support, so they tend to lean heavily on one or two cores, and not do much with any additional cores. You may want to OC that CPU, 2.66GHz is a bit slow for the less threaded games, especially if 1280x1024 is your maximum resolution.

I believe it is possible to create a shortcut to the game exe that will set the affinity for you, without task manager. It would automatically apply the affinity you set to that particular executable. You would have to google the commands that you would have to add to the shortcut. I think after the path to the executable, you add something like -set affinity 5 or something like that.

 

[ojas]

Ah thanks, it sort of worked. See, when i ask it to use all 4 cores, it just results in the default behavior. What seems to be happening is, by default it only uses one core mostly with very little of the others being used. I know the others ARE being used however, because when i force one core i get 17 fps. Only when you manually do stuff to it does it work.

So the compromise i've made for now is to launch it with three cores. sad thing is it scales well with core count.

Anyway, thanks!

 

[ojas]

Best answer selected by ojas.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey