Fix for shaking/quaking/squigly display with Dual-Core CPUs :: Archived

JG300-Stoopy · Last edited by JG300-Stoopy on Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:50 pm; edited 1 time in total

Man, I ran into this a while back and forgot to mention it.....I don't know how many of us have upgraded to new CPU's now but it happened to me and I was going to say somethin' about it......

On newer CPU's and specifically on dual or quad-core Intel CPU's, CFS3 has a bizzarre glitch where the display might be shaking in a "nervous" kind of way. Things can jump around and back and forth real quick, weird. When I first saw this after building my new dual-core system and reinstalling CFS3, I just thought the Brit pilot in the opening screen was shaking in his boots knowing I was getting back in the skies in my FW-190. Smile

The unstable, shrinking, shaking image display in CFS3 is a very quirky result of how it behaves on dual-core processors like my Intel E6750 system. Essentially it doesn't "play well" with both cores and in fact appears to be running on and splitting display tasks between both cores...what you see as a result is the contention going on between both cores as sequential draw calls are made to each core and get out of synch wuth each other.

There's an easy fix that's repetitive, and a harder fix that is a one-time shot.

Easy but PITA repetitive fix:
Launch CFS3 ten press ALT-TAB to get back to the desktop. press CTRL-ALT-DEL to call up the Task Manager. Go to the "Processes" tab, locate the cfs3.exe process, right-click on it, and select "Set Affinity". Then uncheck the other core(s) so that only one core (usually the first) is checked. Close Task Manager, and press ALT-TAB to get back to CFS3. Shaking and quaking shoudl be gone.

Hard one-time fix:
here are some tools out there that can permanently 'tweak' the cfs3.exe task so that it only attaches to one core upon startup. Please not that this will make changes to the cfs3.exe executable file itself, so be sure to COPY it somewhere so you have a backup if something fails!

See this web page for an explanation and specifically look farther down under "Fix #4" part 3. where it talks about a command-line tool called "imagecfg":

www.hardforum.com/show...p?t=983781

Personally this is what I did and I don't have to mess with setting the affinity anymore.

Kinda odd I hadn't heard about it until I upgraded, but was just talking to someone else just now who had this issue and so now I don't feel too unique.

JG300-fr8ycat

Wow, that sounds odd but haven't noticed that problem on my new build.

Nice info to know though, just in case.