Pinning a game to specific CPU cores (affinity)
Also searched as: cpu affinity · set affinity · pin game to cores · process lasso affinity · disable cores for gaming
What it does
Hand-assigning a game to a hand-picked set of CPU cores in Task Manager or a tool like Process Lasso, on the theory you're keeping it off the 'busy' ones.
The honest verdict
Graded placebo. The Windows scheduler already places game threads better than a fixed list can, and it adapts as load shifts — a manual pin can't. At best it does nothing; at worst it starves the game of cores or, on a multi-die AMD chip, forces threads across the slow cross-die boundary you were trying to avoid. …
Compy won't recommend it. If you're curious anyway: change one thing at a time, measure it on your own rig, and revert unless it's clearly better — that loop is exactly what Compy is built around.
The full graded entry
The rest of this write-up — the specifics behind the grade — ships inside the app. The Blackbook publishes its verdicts here — the full write-ups stay in the book, on your rig, next to your own measurements.
The Compy Blackbook holds 191 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
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