Hello. I've been trying to resolve this question for some time now and I haven't been able to find anything online. My computer's CPU is an AMD Athlon II X2 250u dual-core processor; however, my clock speed is barely 1600 MHz, resulting in some very poor textures when I play Mass Effect, among other things. I investigated the problem, and I noticed in the game's configuration menu that only one core is being used. I pretty sure this game is capable of utilizing multiple cores, so it's not a software problem. I'm not overly technical, but my friend, who is kind of a computer nut, mentioned that there are techniques to force the computer to use both cores by altering the BIOS and/or by downloading certain patches. Can anyone elaborate on these techniques? Thanks.
How do I force Mass Effect to use both cores of my CPU?
Débuté par
UnlimitedSeves
, juin 17 2010 03:14
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#2
Posté 17 juin 2010 - 03:18
UnlimitedSeves
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Oh, by the way, my system is running on Windows 7 64-bit with an Nvidia GeForce GT 220 graphics card.
#3
Posté 17 juin 2010 - 09:25
eshrafel
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I'm afraid graphics is almost entirely offloaded onto the graphics card so that will be what primarily makes the difference for you (though your CPU isn't very powerful either). The Unreal 3 engine is more dependent upon CPU than some other engines, and while indeed is threaded (so can 'spread the load' over multiple CPUs if needs be), ME1's minimum spec is a 1-core system as opposed to ME2 which is much more heavily threaded and basically requires 2 CPUs.
There is no real magic to be done here I'm afraid; if there was a switch that could make all programs use all CPUs available programmers would be very happy. In reality, programmers have to identify sections of code to enable over multiple threads/CPUs and then often modify the algorithm so it will work optimally in parallel. Most coding these days is still sitting on the fast-outdating method of assuming 1 CPU and just getting serialised code to run as quick as possible without multi-threading. This is slowly changing, but it would require a lot of effort to mod older games -- most of the parallelised code I have seen has been to do with actual game code as well, since as I mentioned before, the graphics is basically handled by a separate 'computer' (your graphics card) entirely, which these days are already massively parallel (the GTX 295 and other cards have hundreds of very small processors effectively). If you see two cores in Windows "Device Manager" or "Task Manager" then they are available and will be used if possible -- they may not be required if the bottleneck is elsewhere, for example the game may have time to run everything on a single core if it is merely waiting for the graphics card all the time.
There is no real magic to be done here I'm afraid; if there was a switch that could make all programs use all CPUs available programmers would be very happy. In reality, programmers have to identify sections of code to enable over multiple threads/CPUs and then often modify the algorithm so it will work optimally in parallel. Most coding these days is still sitting on the fast-outdating method of assuming 1 CPU and just getting serialised code to run as quick as possible without multi-threading. This is slowly changing, but it would require a lot of effort to mod older games -- most of the parallelised code I have seen has been to do with actual game code as well, since as I mentioned before, the graphics is basically handled by a separate 'computer' (your graphics card) entirely, which these days are already massively parallel (the GTX 295 and other cards have hundreds of very small processors effectively). If you see two cores in Windows "Device Manager" or "Task Manager" then they are available and will be used if possible -- they may not be required if the bottleneck is elsewhere, for example the game may have time to run everything on a single core if it is merely waiting for the graphics card all the time.
