How to dedicate more CPU to a program?

Question

I've been playing Flight Simulator X and its not going very fast. According to http://gameadvisor.futuremark.com/gameadvisor/service/game_index.jsp?gameId=1098
my computer is super fast, in the top 12% of computers they've scanned, and it should run really good. But it doesnt. I think its because its not getting enough CPU power, how can i dedicate more to it? I put the fsx.exe priority in task manager to RealTime, but its still slow. Ideas? thanks in advance

ATI Radeon Mobility 9700. I thought that might be it too. But it's on a laptop and i dont really feel like replacing it. Or buying one for that matter.

Answer 1

What graphic card are you using? Your graphic card might be responsible for your computer's slow performance.

Answer 2

Real-time is the highest priority. When you're playing, does the CPU max out to 100% or is it instead "IO bound" (i.e. it's the hard disk access that's slow). (One way to find out might be to use Sysinternal's ProcessExplorer rather than Task Manager, as if you're playing in full screen mode you won't necessarily be able to see the task manager at the same time - but Process Explorer keeps a limited CPU history, which means you might be able to switch to it to find out).

If the CPU maxes to 100%, then you're pretty much SOL unless there's some processes other than the flight sim which are hogging the CPU (and of course you'll want to kill off these processes).

If instead you're IO-bound, then consider defragmenting and increasing the size of your paging file.

Answer 3

Download Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com

This gives you more flexibility on your threads and processes. I would make sure other programs are not "stealing" CPU time on the system.

Have you checked your video card performance? With real-time rendering of a simulation program I would think your video card would be the bottleneck.