Everquest & CPU Affinity for Boxing As MS Windows 10 becomes more of a service then an OS, what with the Windows Super-user overwriting changes we make. here is something helpful for boxers. 'k in Windows 10 it does not allow you to set an affinity for CPU's ( task manager, services not saving & being overwritten by Super-user as well as the eqclient.ini file) in order to do this you need to create some BAT files, These MUST be placed in your Everquest folder the syntax is simple: Code: start /affinity CPUHEX launchpad.exe in order for windows to understand what CPU you want to use it must be written in Hexadecimal, & your first CPU is CPU 0 not 1 as you would think. the CPUHEX being as follows: I have done the work for you for CPU 0 through 7 here: processor 0: 0x1 processor 1: 0x2 processor 2: 0x4 processor 3: 0x8 processor 4: 0x16 processor 5: 0x32 processor 6: 0x64 processor 7: 0x128 so to make a Batch file that starts EQ in CPU 1 (your 2nd CPU the batch file would read: Code: start /affinity 0x2 launchpad.exe the reason the BAT files need to be in the Everquest directory is the shortcut will tell it yo run in that directory, so it will work correctly then you click the BAT file, select copy, & Paste Shortcut, on your desktop. this insures that Windows 10 starts that instance of Everquest using the correct CPU, As I only have 5 instances of Everquest running at a time I have 5 Bat files & five shortcuts Labeled EQ-Box 1-5, I used the icon from launchpad to make the shortcuts standout as different from the Everquest shortcut. I hope this helps some of you, if you do not know how to make a BAT file, then contact me & I will explain that to you but if your boxing EQ you should know how to use this information. Larul Wolfcaller Shamaness 110 The Silent Minority The Rathe aka TheWolfcaller ____________________________ Larul Wolfcaller Shamaness 110 Rabbits InTheHat Mage 110 Talia Legerdmaine Enchanter 110 Iroll NoMoss Ranger 110 The Silent Minority The Rathe Server
I thought "a certain program that I use" handled this during the team setup wizard. Am I mistaken? Oops. Guess I got censored.
Ive always had EQ affinity set to use all cpu's. Does it really make a difference to put different boxes on separate cpu's? I mean in theory it seems like it might, but can you really tell a difference?
I noticed a big difference in earlier versions of Windows. But in modern Windows 10 and with modern processors, letting the OS manage processor assignments has provided the best performance for me. For reference, I am using Win 10 with Intel i7 (3770) and i5 (3570k) processors. You can check the status of your system's cores by opening Resource Monitor (which you can open via the link at the bottom of Task Manager>>Performance tab). The CPU tab of Resource Monitor will show you the CPU usage for each of your separate cores. It's easy to launch an EQ client and note the usage, and then launch another client and watch what changes. I have CPU Affinity set to -1 in my eqclient.ini file (to use all cores). As expected, all 8 reported cores (quad core i7 with hyperthreading) are being used. With 6 clients logged in (at banker in bazaar, FV server), I'm hovering between 50%-60% total CPU usage (all cores). I show ~65% on the highest core and ~40% on the lowest core, with the rest pretty evenly distributed between.
ok as of August MS Windows 10 Update THIS IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Windows Super-user as disabled the ability to run the BAT files.
It is no longer needed. Windows 10 has the ability to allocate CPU resources at the hardware level thanks to Windows 10's ability to dynamically allocate processor time if the application generating the CPU interrupt is not capable of using the SetThreadAffinityMask (EverQuest is not). This is not as efficient as the application itself allocating resources, but is much more effective than strapping a particular application to a specific CPU core(s). tl;dr Assigning cores for multiboxing is not only no longer needed, it also sacrifices efficiency.