Some old games use multiple threads but since they were written before multi-core CPUs were around, they can behave not-as-designed when those threads run at the same time.

Has anyone compiled a list of these games?

There are ways to force application to work on one thread, so there's no point in disabling cores.

If your main goal just make another video for your channel it's not worth all the efforts and time to workaround all possible conflicts with multi processor setups (HT and multi-core is just the same for software). That is mostly precaution for early pre W2000 aware games and some drivers.

in my experience, both unreal engine 1 based games (unreal, ut99 and so) and both serious sam TFE and TSE tend to have problems with multiple cores/threads:

-ridicously fast timing (game seems to run crazy fast but the fps aren't as high)
-bad or wrong framepacing and heavy stutter
-low framerates or impossibility to run the game

serpent rider is right. 🤣

Simpsons hit and Run has wonky physics on modern processors too, and crashes a bunch. At least without the community patches.

You can set the thread affinity in task manager, but it is a lot easier to just disable all but one core instead.

that's ironic that both my of windows xp machines are dual processor systems, 2x Pentium Pro 200MHz and 2x Pentium 3 850MHz

He also disables all IO he doesn't use even though he really doesn't need to, it's just his modus operandi. XP and 99% of XP software work fine on multicores and adjusting core affinity is easy as pie. He just feels more comfortable this way.

Given that few if any games from the XP era really take advantage of multi cores - and many suffer from them - why not? Set and forget, much easier than dealing with core affinity every time you play. Games only started utilizing multi cores in the late 2000s, and it seems only really need good MT performance in the last few years.

There's actually a way to set up your game shortcut to automatically launch it with 1 core affinity, so that you don't have to manually do it each time you start it, but I agree having only 1 core enabled is one less thing to worry about.

kolderman wrote:

Given that few if any games from the XP era really take advantage of multi cores - and many suffer from them - why not? Set and forget, much easier than dealing with core affinity every time you play. Games only started utilizing multi cores in the late 2000s, and it seems only really need good MT performance in the last few years.

The OS itself benefits from it and the game can be set to single core affinity so why disable it is a more appropriate question I think.

Why does anyone do anything? Because they want to or they were directed to.

Why play games on XP since Windows 10 is the best OS ever created and runs all games perfectly?
Why play games at all?

Ask Phil

Closed