Optimize your Cores

There's little doubt that the future of gaming will include support for multiple cores on your processor, and potentially on your graphics card too, but we're not quite at this multi-core nirvana yet. As of right now there are a few oddities that mean some games don't make the most out of your hardware. Plus, there are times when you want one critical application to have a core all to itself, so that it isn't interrupted by what you are doing elsewhere on your system. This is where managing programs and there association with cores comes into play.

The technical term for associating applications with cores is 'affinity' and Windows provides a delightfully simple way of associating a running program or process with one or more of your cores.

Apart from trying to tweak a little more performance out of your PC, the main reason you'd want to do this is if you have an Intel processor that boasts HyperThreading (HT). Gamers have found that some games perform worse with HT enabled than without. You could turn HT off in your BIOS, but as it actually provides a decent performance boost for the majority of the time, this isn't necessarily the best thing to do. Instead you should just assign the game to a single core.

How to go Single Core

The Windows Task Manager is the key to assigning your games and applications to your processor cores (whether real or logical cores). Access Task Manager neatly, by hitting [Windows] + [R] keys) and typing 'Taskmgr'.

Click on the Processes tab and find the app you wish to change. Right-click the entry, and select ‘Set Affinity’ from the drop-down list. A simple box appears listing all the cores that the game normally has access to. Clearing a check box means that it won't run on that core, although you need to be careful not to clear both, otherwise the game could get confused. Try setting the game to use one core and then benchmark it. Note that you can also try playing with the process priority, although this can mean that system processes (such as I/O calls) are left behind, which can make things even slower.

Click on the Performance tab, and you should find that one core is being used far more than the other. If you have one core, then you'll only see a single CPU Usage History window at the top of the screen.