Setting a game to High priority in Task Manager
Also searched as: high priority · realtime priority · task manager priority · process priority · priority hack
What it does
Raising a game's CPU priority to High — or Realtime — in Task Manager so Windows favors it over everything else.
The honest verdict
Priority only decides who wins when threads are FIGHTING for a core, and on a healthy rig running one game, nothing is fighting — Windows already favors the window you're playing in, so High changes nothing you can measure. Realtime is worse than nothing: it lets the game starve the system threads that feed it, which surfaces as crackling audio and stutters you didn't have before. And the setting dies with the process, so the ritual silently resets every launch. If something heavy genuinely competes with your game, the honest fix is closing it — and measuring the difference.
How Compy treats it
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 Compy Blackbook holds 174 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
See Compy →