Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

From developer side, if support for older OS than Windows XP or Linux 2.6 is not necessary, HPET is much better solution for timing.

Sanguine 2008-10-11 22:49:38

Related:
* AMD Dual-Core Optimizer bug

Sanguine 2008-10-11 21:08:59

This group should not really exist as it will occur in all games that use the RDTSC x86 instruction. But there's no good alternative to delegate this info to, unless the issue is limited to dual-core Athlon CPUs (as in, no longer present in Phenom CPUs nor in any others) in which case we can consider it too insignificant to matter.

It seems this bug may surface on Intel CPUs as well, but with much less visible effect.

Sanguine 2008-09-20 04:46:02

Symptoms:
Strange game speed, usually much too fast.

Cause:
Game reads RDTSC directly instead of using O/S's own timer functionality.

Fix:
1) Use AMD dual-core optimizer. The optimizer however is background process that's always on so you can't set per-application behaviour, and since some games behave extremely poorly when it's used, it's not recommended.

2) Limit the game to single CPU core

2a) Create a cmd/bat file with start /affinity 1 executable written in it. Place it in the folder which contains the game's executable and use it to start the game.

2b) Use Win 95 or Win 98 compatibility mode. This may be sufficient for some games, not for others.

2c) Use ctr-alt-del to bring up task manager when the game is running and limit the CPU affinity there. This may not work very well if you're not returned back to Windows properly and unlike the two former solution, requires you to do it every time the game is started. Also not viable if the game runs into issues right off the bat, so changing the CPU affinity afterwards has little effect.

3) Use third-party application that automatically does what option 2a instructs you to.

Mis-tagging:
Some games may be mis-tagged with this in case the problem is with thread synchronization (trying to play with multi-core intel or other CPU without the RDTSC issue and still experiencing the bug would be indication of it). But thread synchronization issues are more likely to cause race issues, deadlock the game and possibly the OS as well and as such are do not exhibit the behaviour described here.

Sanguine 2008-06-24 22:32:12

 Aliens versus Predator 2 win

 Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines win

 WorldShift win

 The Thing win

 Far Cry 2 win

 Black & White 2 win