I have been playing SC for a while now and always though the stuttering and huge drops in framerate were part of the experience. I watched a video and found out that there is an issue with 12th and 13th gen Intel processors, where SC doesn’t know how to handle the E-cores. I guess CIG is working on a solution but who knows how long that will take.
Excited at possibly improving my game play I fired up SC and when to task manager to set the CPU affinity to just the P-cores and was promptly defeated by an error message. After some searching determined that Easy anti-cheat prevents you from changing the affinity or priority of SC once it is running. So that was a dead end. I could always disable the E-cores in BIOS, but I am not going to fiddle with that each time I want to play.
I then stumbled upon this marvelous software Process Lasso, which allows you to set among other items the affinity of any process running on your system and it kicks in before EAC loads! So fired up SC found the SC process, set the affinity to always only use the P-cores and disable hyper threading. Restarted the game and it worked! My experience is massively improved, I don’t get anywhere near the stuttering and hitching I was before. My enjoyment of the game has increased significantly.
Bottom line, if you’re running a 12th or 13th gen Intel, download Process Lasso. I have since moved all the background junk like fan and lighting control processes to only use the E-cores, which leaves my P-cores unencumbered to run my foreground applications.
And yes windows is supposed to have a scheduler which should be managing what process goes on which type of core but I would rather tell the computer what I want running where rather than hoping windows figures it out. Now my E-cores are at about 20-50% utilization and P-cores 0-5% while sitting idle at the desktop.
System Specs:
13700K
64 GB DDR5 6000
3090
Windows 11
980 Pro SSD
Very interesting. I have a 12th gen Intel and wondering if I might be able to improve my performance by doing this. I also have stuttering and framerate drops - not severe, but noticeable.
Looks like the free version of Process Lasso offers the processor affinity feature that you are referring to. Is that the version you are using, or the pro paid version?
I was getting something similar and I have seen a big improvement, well worth a try can’t hurt anything. I am using the free version of the software.
Gotcha. I downloaded the free version as well.
For the affinity, are you accepting the only even or only odd-numbered cores default, or are you setting affinity for the exe to all of the P cores?
Made a new shortcut to the launcher on my desktop to test with. It seems to carry the affinity through to the game itself.
%ComSpec% /C Start “RSI Launcher” /Normal /Affinity 0x0000000000000000 “C:\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\RSI Launcher\RSI Launcher.exe”
Replace the appropriate drive path “C:\Program Files.…” to where the launcher is and use the CPU affinity mask calculator to find the bitmask value 0x0000000000000000 to replace. The last cores/threads listed on the calculator for an Intel will always be the e-cores. So you select the cores from the calculator you want to use (P-cores) and exclude everything after (E-cores).
Although I haven’t seen a performance gain, so far I have seen an overall temperature drop across the CPU without the e-cores trying to run balls-to-the-wall while Star Citizen is loaded.
I only have the odd P cores selected. Since the P-cores use hyper threading, you could do either the odds or evens, its the same either way. The game seems to run better without using HY.
There is multiple ways to achieve the same goal, which is to keep the game from running on E-cores. My preference is the software approach. When or if CIG fixes the issue, changes to the windows registry may cause problems and I don’t want to keep track of what I have fiddled with.
The one I used in my last post is changing the shortcut target path to initially open the RSI launcher in command line with the values applied on launch. No registry edit there. Don’t want to use affinity anymore just delete everything except the actual game path that’s in quotes. Or make a new shortcut from the launcher and delete the modified one.