The purpose of this thread is to help one another understand the basic and complex process of tweaking and optimizing your computer to its full potential. So basically, I hope we can learn everything from turning your computer on..... to turning your computer off . For starters, I going to hopefully show you guys and gals how to overclock your CPU. But first I going to hold off for a bit because I need to find out what programs I use to run the tests. So for now, I going to post up my computer specs up next to your's, Skaara. I will hopefully get further on this topic by tomorrow.
Excuse my long absence on the forums guys. Well this isn't going to show you how to over-clock your CPU, yet, but it will tie in with it in the end. Anyway, some of you have probably noticed on your copy(s) of any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games that it is recommended to play with a Dual Core Processor or better. Unfortunately, when your start up the game, the X-ray will not read that you're using a dual core processor and put off all the workload all on one core. So here I am to show you how to fix this problem and hopefully boost that frame-rate by 10 FPS or more. The only downside to this is that it is not a permanent fix and you will have to do it every time you start up the game(s). Step 1: Start up any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and when you get to the main menu, do Ctrl+Alt+Delete. When the little navigation window pops up, go to Task Manager. If you check under your performance tab, you'll see that only one of the cores is being unutilized and that the other is barley doing any work or none, as shown here. Step 2: Now, go to your Applications tab on top and locate XR_3DA.exe and right click on it. Step 3: Once you have right clicked, go to and click on Set Affinity. Step 4: Here, you will see two boxes that are checked off (if you have a quad core or higher, obviously you'll have more boxes checked off). Uncheck either off the two, it doesn't matter which one and close the Processor Affinity window !(If you have a quad core or higher, you might need to check off two of the boxes for it to work. I don't know though since I only have a dual core, but this is the fun part of troubleshooting). Step 5: Do Ctrl+Alt+Delete again and go to your task manager and repeat steps 2 and 3. When you get to the Processor Affinity window, recheck the box that you previously unchecked on step 4. Step 6: Close the Task Manager windows and get back into the game, enjoy! If you'd like, do Ctrl+Alt+Delete again and go to your performance tab in Task Manger once your are in the game. Your CPU usage should look more like this now.
Interesting trick with the CPU affinity, if only it was that simple to force games to properly utilize extra cores. (Don't worry little FX 6300, you'll have your day) Overclocking is a much more complex and risky thing to try, though. I'd personally recommend reading multiple guides before even attempting a simple clock rate adjustment. Also, try and stick to the BIOS if you're going to be upping Voltages at all. And if your BIOS doesn't have any overclocking options, well...you shouldn't be trying an overclock on that motherboard.
This game isn't hard on the cpu which is kinda cool. It appears to hit the I/O extremely hard and GPU.... Basically the textures are of high resolution so the texture data must be processed via the hard drive through the south bridge, then north bridge, then cached in "ram" then read by the CPU. From there it's channeled into the GPU memory and processed by the GPU Core. As we know the gpu's memory and core gets 3d data processed more quickly and more efficiently than the cpu/ system ram does. Mostly has to do with say if ur gpu is clocked at say 900mhz and you have 336 cores that's 302,400Mhz of graphics processing power. The cpu may have 4 cores at 4,500mhz each that's only 18,000Mhz. Then the GPU Ram is GDDR5 (Graphic optimized DDR5, not the same as DDR5 as the Nano second delay is shorter to reduce lag on response for gaming). That same response isn't required by the cpu. Anyway there's a lot more to go over but I'd make sure u have ur I/O up to chops to play this game. Download HDTune set a 8MB and "Accurate" and benchmark your hard drive for 30 seconds see what your min/ max is. The game reads from the hard drive like mad in game which would cause hitching and "lag" in game because the I/O can't keep up with the texture data. To make sure the Game runs smoothly with Zero hitching you really need to Run a RAID0 or a killer SSD... I run a RAID0 on 2 7200rpm drives on the Intel ICH10R southbridge and it muscles through Metro Last Light's I/O like nothing. Then again HDTune is just around 280MB/s read/ write. So make sure your getting at a Bare minimum 100MB/s and if your not getting 100MB/s then I'd suggest you go for RAID0 drives or an SSD. RAID0 7200rpm drives are way cheaper and play games very well with no trace of Hitching.
