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AMD X2 driver and hotfix correct installation

Phemo said:
You do NOT need to edit the registry to enable the hotfix. Read more carefully. Look at the Microsoft article and read the heading above the notes about editing the registry. Note how it says "How to disable the new performance state policy behavior".

Editing the registry and putting the value as 1 does nothing that installing the hotfix alone doesn't do.

Save yourselves time by not doing this, it's pointless because people haven't read the MS article properly.

With that piece of fluff removed I agree, it would be a useful sticky to have :)
Click to expand...

I still would recommend checking the BOOT.ini file has the /usepmtimer switch command in it.
 
Tim said:
What? The hotfix fixes game stuttering with dual core processors, which is what I want fixing :confused:

Theres a specific patch for CoD2 thats aimed at dual core users, are you saying this is whats causing the problems? Setting the affinity to use core0 only DOES fix my problem.
Click to expand...
What I'm saying is, you're getting this hot fix confused with something that it isn't. It fixes issues related to SpeedStep/C'n'Q. It does not change anything related to context switching.

The problem you are experiencing is caused by the game starting up on say core0. Then at some indeterminate time later it gets context switched onto core1. Both cores run at slightly different timings (because one gets turned on by the BIOS and the other gets turned on by the Windows kernel at least a few seconds later). As a result the game gets very confused and all its time sensitive calculations are messed up.

This is caused by the faulty third party code - in this case, the game. It cannot be fixed by Microsoft, ever.

You're right, the easy way to workaround it is to simply set the "affinity" of the game process. This tells the scheduler to only allow the game to run on say core0 or core1. Which means the game's fatal assumption over which core it is running on does not matter because you've effectively stopped the swap between cores from ever happening, for that process alone.

I'm not saying the dual core patch for CoD could be causing it. I'm saying that is likely to be the fix! :)
 
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Like smids said its a little kernel power manager fix that allows it to correctly calculate the optimal target performance state of your dc processor. Otherwise xp will see the individual logical processor cores to be less busy than the whole cpu.
It should have sorted you problem, so you dont have to manually set the affinity of the game to a single core every time you want to play it. I guess it must be something else, you could blame the game but a lot of people have managed to get cod2 running well on there x2 system, not sure m8.
 
is this hotfix for games that doesnt support dual core?
for example playing cs:s before i did the fix was fine. I had some problems playing nfs:mw and cs 1.6. After the hotfix all games run fine. COD2 runs very well too.
Does this hotfix affect the gameplay of the games already supporting dual cores? e.g. cs:s. i havnt noticed any difference.
 
Here's a pasted post from Xtremesystems regarding what the MS Hotfix actually does, as there seems to be a lot of misconception..

AMD X2 Windows XP patch: my opinion
The hotfix solve three problems. Let's see them one by one in order to understand what we really need:

1) Possible decrease in performance during demand-based switching
Windows XP supports processor performace state transitions in order to reduce the energy drawn by the processor. A performance state is a couple of frequency and voltage values: lower the performance state lower the frequency and the voltage lower the energy consumption. The problem here is that in a dual-core system windows can select the wrong performance state; this action of course will result in decreased performance. The new power-saving strategy solve this problem, but it is disabled by default. As we know the new behaviour is enabled by setting the value PerfEnablePackageIdle to 1.

Now the question: do we really need the new performance behaviour?
The answer: NO

Inside the answer:
The performace states of the processor (P-States) can be changed only if:
1) Cool And Quiet is enabled in the Bios.
2) The AMD Driver is installed.
You can see the details on the excellent document "BIOS and Kernel Developer’s Guide for the AMD Athlon™ 64 and
AMD Opteron™ Processors" that can be found on the AMD site.
So if Cool And Quiet is disabled or the AMD driver is not installed, we do not need to enable the new power saving strategy.

2)Correct TSC synchronization
3)Correct C-state promotion and demotion
I'll discusse these 2 points together as they are strictly correlated.
On AMD dual core processors the TSC (Time Stamp Counter) registers of the two cores may drift with respect to one another as a result of P-states change (that does not occur if Cool And Quiet is disabled) or as a result of one core entering the C1 state. One core enter the C1 state when the OS issues an HLT instruction. So the idle process of windows (that uses HLT instructions) causes the core in idle state to enter the C1 state. Now if a game use the TSC values of the cores and the affinity is set to both the CPU it'll get confused by the two different values. The result is that we experience stutter. These 2 points are the important ones in the patch because with this fix windows synchronyze the TSC values on the basis of the the ACPI timer even when the processor enter the C1 state.

As a result of this analysis we can get this little FAQ:

Q) Do we need the hotfix for AMD dual core processor
A) Yes

Q) Do we need to set the value key PerfEnablePackageIdle to 1?
A) Only if we use Cool And Quiet

Q) Is is necessary to install the new AMD driver?
A) This driver is only needed if we use Cool And quiet because it addresses together with the first hotfix a problem specific to P-states transition.

Q) it is necessary to add the string /usepmtimer in the boot.ini?
A) /usepmtimer instructs the Os to use the ACPI timer instead of the TSC timer (default action). Because with the patch windows corrects the wrong TSC behaviour the /usepmtimer switch is not needed.
 
well i just installed these and now my pc blue screens as soon as it loads xp, bit pee'd off now.

removed the microsoft patch and its fine again.


any ideas on the problem? i did the amd patch then rebooted, then the windows patch and rebooted but then i couldn't get into windows unless it was in safe mode.
 
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i just got my new x2 today aswell - so far i've only put the amd driver on and everything is working fine - i will probably run like this until i see a problem
 
I got my x2 3800+ processor today and replaced my 3000+, and the ONLY thing I installed was the AMD DUAL CORE OPTIMIZER. When I first booted up the PC, it loaded up a driver automatically. It resolved an issue of stuttering sound when I had my WinTV HVR TV card open and browsing the net. Running really smooth since now.

Im not sure why people would want to install these hotfixes/drivers as I think these are all related to the powersaving "Cool`n`quiet", something most of us overclockers should not be using. Am I missing something? Working so far... but for how long? LOL
 
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