ToW2- Force One CPU trigger in "ToW2\users\video"?

[sandman2575]

For those with i7 or multi-core CPUs --

I know ToW1 has a "one Cpu" option in Settings. ToW2 Africa & Kursk do not. For those with multi-core CPUS, It is often advised to 'disable multithreading' to force 1 CPU usage, or to set CPU affinity to 1 or 2 cores in the Task Manager. Neither of these has ever yielded improved performance for me (i have an i7 quadcore). In particular, disabling multi-threading via the nVidia control panel does nothing (it seems creating an nVidia profile for ToW2 and trying to adjust settings through it has no effect at all)

I came across the Configuration Setting files in "ToW2\users" and see that the "Video" file contains this:

;INI File: users/video.ini
[core]
GrassAll=2
TreesDistLod=2
TreeDistance=2
Sky=0
WaterQuality=1
Noise=1
PSM=2
mouseHardwareCursor=1
ObjectsQuality=3
ShowAmmunition=1
HideBodies=0
DetailPreset=3
RenderRoads=1
RoadsQuality=0
VehicleEffects=1
UseOneCPU=0
HDRenable=1
SoftParticles=1
SSAO=0
widthResolution=1920
heightResolution=1080
refreshRate=60
oldWidthResolution=1920
oldHeightResolution=1080
oldRefreshRate=60


You can enable the "UseOneCPU" trigger by setting it to "UseOneCPU=1" and saving.

This does force 1 CPU core usage, from what I can tell from the Resource Monitor in Windows Control Panel.

I have seen modest performance improvement with this. Nothing dramatic, but in thick battles where my FPS definitely deteriorate, the game now seems smoother, although I don't think there's clear FPS improvement (from what I can tell from FRAPs) using "UseOneCPU=1".

Has anyone else tried this? I've never seen it mentioned in threads, either here or on Battlefront / 1C ToW site.

I'm wondering if there's a way to further tweak these "Video" setting to squeeze better performance -- ???

[gooana]

I tried this UseOneCPU setting & found that I suffered some major grinding.
I am using an AMD CPU but did see some FPS drops after an upgrade to a more recent chip a while back. I'm running x64 which in itself has helped ToW performance for me in the past.

My biggest performance boosts came from setting :-

1. in Nvidia control panel making the ToW2 profile force on Vsync
2. in Process Lasso - classifying kursk (or africa) .bin as game processes (right click menu in the main window).
3. using the 4gb patch on the .bin to give it more RAM addressing. (It won't work on the game.exe as this files' byte value must be linked to the copy protection routine & the game won't launch with this header mod applied.)

I also had set affinity & critical / real-time priorities on I/O etc in PL.

With everything on max gfx-wise I went from 3-5fps during high ground unit activity + air attack, to 15fps.
Turning off Ambient Occlusion got me to 22-25fps in the same conditions.
Really the hardware I have should run this series way better but this makes it bearable.

I really hope 1C decide to spend 5 minutes looking at the code for better handling of newer chips.

Maybe we need a petition...?!

UPDATE

Wanted more performance & decided to investigate the fact ambient occlusion is 'greyed out' in the nvidia CP when the game clearly has it as an option.

Using NVIDIA Inspector I enabled AO & set up a profile as shown in the image below:-
http://i42.tinypic.com/xpomk5.jpg

The result - I am now able to put everything back on max & get good FPS even during air-action.

Hopefully this will help others find their own solutions to the low FPS on new rigs!
If anyone knows how the gfx engine is configured to assist in tweaking the game profile that would be good, eg what AA & Ansio profiles would be best........ Sneaksie ?


New Nvidia gfx driver 296.10 works with the above tweaks.

Process Lasso
These are the settings with work best for my 6 (physical) core CPU:-

kursk1943.exe -
default affinity cores 4,5 (ie the cores at the tail of the queue to be addressed by most foreground processes)
default i/o priority - critical
default priority class - Real time; windows dynamic thread priority boost - DISABLED

[or garbled sound + stuttering in game FPS result - I assume Win dynamic boost 'thinks' the exe should be prioritized & thus takes cores & cycles from the .bin which is doing the work, this creates the stuttering & faulty sound output. The PL window actually shows the exe taking all cores & the .bin has ONLY core 0 allocated whilst the game is running!! This happens even with the affinities set manually, having PL kill the dynamic boost seems essential.]

kursk1943.bin -
default affinity cores 0-5 (ie all cores available)
default i/o priority critical
default priority class - Real time; windows dynamic thread default priority boost enabled

Both exe & bin -
power profile - high performance
classified as game processes
excluded from probalance restraint

So far Africa & Korea haven't shown a need to disable windows dynamic thread priority boost for the exes, but all other settings can be applied to improve performance on my rig.

Would be nice if other users gave me some feed-back as to whether this works for them.