How Does Windower Interact With CPU Cores?

Hello All,

After reading some other posts on the FFXIAH forums, I wanted to get some clarification.

To the best of my understanding: Because of the game's age, FFXI can only use one CPU core, no matter how many cores the CPU has.

Again, to the best of my understanding: For the game to run across all CPU cores, or at least two (2) cores, the game's engine would need to be rewritten. Would this be a complete and total from-the-ground-up rewrite or perhaps something less extensive than that??

Finally: If I'm using Windower4 to play two instances of the game, does Windower have the ability/authority to put the second instance onto another core? If Windower is unable to put the second instance onto another core, is that second instance putting additional stress on the single core?

I apologize if this has been discussed before. If this subject has been covered in the past, I wasn't able to find it.

Thanks so much for your help.

I'm going so hard on asura rn lol

Difference instances use different cores by default on my machine, if you really want to make sure just set the affinity in task manager.

affinity in Task Manager??

Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.

Right click the instance of POL.

Go to Details.



(No idea if this works, this is just how to do it)

Windows will, entirely on it's own, spread applications between cores to achieve what it considers to be the best performance. Setting affinity or priority restrict what it can do, to try to force the results you want. This often backfires; windows has been very heavily engineered and a stuck task can slow down other tasks even if the other tasks are higher priority.

For example, you have a 2 core machine and are running 2 FFXIs. Windows decides to start installing an update, taking up a core worth of resources. If you've used affinity to force 1 FFXI to each core, the update will be fighting one of your instances on the same core and it'll have severe fps drops and lockups. If you haven't, your FFXIs may end up on the same core while the update gets shifted to the other core, and both will remain functional.

tldr; don't worry about affinity, try to have at least 1 more core than you have ffxi instances and windows will generally keep 1 instance on each core and shove all your smaller background tasks on the remaining cores, but adjust as needed to give you the best performance it can