Great info. Will try this as soon as I can (on laptop now)

Apprecaite all the help everyone!

P.S. this may I hope fix a similar issue I have in another game..

Hmm.. I haven't searched the forums entirely yet... but I did read over this dual core thing. I am still downloading the game as I just purchased it... but I will be running this on my machine (Dell PowerEdge 1800) that is dual xeon's. Since, it is intel i'm sure this will not have the same problem but I may find others... *sigh*

Dell PowerEdge 1800
2 x Xeon 3.0ghz 2MB - HT enabled
XP Pro SP2
SATA Raid
2GB Ram
ATI x800 (PCIe running @ 4x instead of 16x)

Playing the game before patches: major teleporting and graphics issues.

Installed AMD patch and the hotfix.

Playing the game for 2 hours and then leaving it on the ship building screen for 6 hours and then playing for another 1 hour: NO ISSUES anymore!!

Did not disable CnQ or set affinity to one processor either.



Thanks everyone.

System is a AMD dual core Athlon 4200
Nvidia 6800 GS

Wow, I'm glad my Intel Core Duo setup doesn't have this problem...yet.

Big thumbs up to you!

Had this problem with Rome Total War (and with GCII when it arrives in the post ) but I always got around it by setting the affinity to just 1 core. Many thanks to you, hope this works ^^

I've had this problem too. Downloading the patch now, so I hope it helps.

Not only did the ships/planets spin at an amazing rate, the view of the galaxy began to zoom in, stutter, and jump to all sorts of co-ordinates, many of which were off the map. Holding the mouse button down stopped it, but as soon as you let go the fun would begin again.

Ooh, patch is finished... here we go...

A quick note: The current generation of Nvidia drivers plays hell with dual-core systems and a lotta games that aren't optimized for a dual-core processor. As much as I've learned, it has to do with some optimizing software built into the current drivers that has a tendency to hard-lock a lotta older/current games within about a minute.

wow..this forum has truncated every post..can't read any of them barely. Figures, cause I need this info too...

I am running an AMD 64 X2 and can verify that the AMD 64 X2 processor driver update (May 2005 v1.2.2.2) did indeed fix my problem with the insanely spinning ship/planet models, and the problem caused by trying to scroll using the pointer on the screen edges.

Link

The game seems solid as a rock now...

I wonder if this patch will also fix the issue with Thunderbird 1.5 on dual cores...

-Stresa

From the description it seems that I'm having the same problem with my game.

However, I've never done something as updating my processor drives before and I'm quite terrified I'll do something wrong.
Do I just download and run it? How do I know its the right one? What if something goes wrong?
Can I do permanent damage to my system this way? Will it still be able to boot if it's done wrong?

Can someone please put my mind at ease with a reassuring answer?

What I know is that I have a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor
I am using Windows XP SP1
and I have DirectX 9.0c
As far as I know my graphic drivers for my GeForce 7800 GTX are up to date at 81.95

Thanks in advance
- Nyst

I have another problem.

My game doesn't even load. After the loading screen right before the game would start, the game would just disappear and I'll be looking at nothing but the desktop

I'm using the AMD Athlon64X2 3800
My video card is BFG 7800GT.

Don't know what to do. Can't even play.

Anyone? Please?

Cool, a patch, hopefully all will run well when I get my Alienware laptop during my AiT.

i dont know about the AMD , but my intell dual core system, for most of my older games (starwars knights of the old republic comes to mind off hand) i had to roll back my Nvidia drivers to the 77.77 series to get the games to run. on the other had i didnt have any trouble with GS 2 with either set of drivers.

best bet? stop buying AMD crap

Hello All,
I downloaded the drivers but I am still having issues with the tutorial. The voice is very choppy. The music is fine and I can play a regular game however. I updated the AC '97 and nVidia drivers too.

@Flash - try turning off anti-aliasing.

Oldstatesman,
Thanks, that did the trick.

Um ive got a Intel Core DUO T2400 for my laptop and it runs at 1.83 GHZ per processor and theres 2 processors.

I have dual 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4 processors... and the game keeps crashing on me, do I need a fix too, and if so, where do I go, as this post seems to be AMD only.

Thanks, DeadlySeraph

Any game may run extremely too fast with an X2 processor. Even Far Cry was excessively fast, but I'm a genius (sooo samrt )


the fix for ALL games (apparently) is:


Run the game

Alt+Tab or Ctrl+Alt+Del


Locate the process

Right mouse button, click "Set Affinity" and set it to either the first or second core or for HT people logical cores.



click OK


basically i think its because its designed to run flat out on a single processor, but because its forced to run on 2 because of windows xp, it runs approx 2x as fast or 8Tx if you play far cry. It work so far with Galciv2, AvP2, FarCry, and NFSU2. Good luck.

Any game may run extremely too fast with an X2 processor. Even Far Cry was excessively fast, but I'm a genius (sooo samrt )


the fix for ALL games (apparently) is:


Run the game

Alt+Tab or Ctrl+Alt+Del


Locate the process

Right mouse button, click "Set Affinity" and set it to either the first or second core or for HT people logical cores.



click OK


basically i think its because its designed to run flat out on a single processor, but because its forced to run on 2 because of windows xp, it runs approx 2x as fast or 8Tx if you play far cry. It work so far with Galciv2, AvP2, FarCry, and NFSU2. Good luck.

Have you tried again using the activation prompt when the game attempts to start? So long as the machine GC2 is on is up and online with no problems, it was probably only a temporary issue with the server.

There is also a command line way of telling windows what CPU to set the tasks affinity to. I just forgot it heh. Anyway, not only did the AMD Drivers fix my problem they also fixed what seemed to be a memory leak.

ok not the topic I was trying to post in sorry

The command for starting a program with affinity to a single core is "start /affinity 1 (executable name)".

As for what the actual problem is, it's really a bug in *all* the games that have this problem. They use the instruction "RDTSC" to read the timestamp counter on the current CPU and use that to figure out how much time has passed in order to throttle the graphics display. When you are on a multicore system, the RDTSC instruction returns the timestamp counter for the *current* core, which may not be the same as the counter for the other core due to all sorts of things happening, usually involving clock throttling from Cool'n'Quiet or something else similar. So, when the game reads the counter first from one core then another, the calculations it makes to determine how much time has gone by get messed up, so you see strange artifacts on the screen.

To whoever said Cool'n'Quiet wasn't for reducing your electrical bill, you're nuts. It reduces the energy used by the CPU (which results in the CPU running cooler). Enabling Cool'n'Quiet on my system drops the energy usage by about 100W, as measured by the UPS, so it's about the same as turning off a couple of lights in energy savings. Well written games should never require you to have this turned off, but I agree that many do.