FFXI graphic stutters on Multicore Processors (Fix included, may also be nice for Dualboxers)

[Velocy]

Heya all,

after I got my new mainboard and processor today (I moved from Athlon X2 6000+ to a Phenom X4 965), I noticed graphic stutters (or "Microlags") every 15-20 seconds. I had this on my system before, but not that heavy, so I didn't care. After searching several forums I've seen quite a few people reporting similar issues after getting a new processor. The problem occurs when FFXI is allowed to run in all cores of your processor.
The solution to this, is limiting FFXI to a single core. I'd like to show up a few possibilitys how to do that.

1. Manually
Launch POL. Launch your Taskmanager. Switch to the "Processes" tab and right click "pol.exe" and click "Set affiniy".
You can now select, which core FFXI should run on. Limit it to 1 core (you may want to select CPU 1 or higher, as most stuff runs on CPU 0). This method is not a permanent change! After closing POL and reopening it, it has to be redone.

2. Automatic
The dos command "start" allows a paramenter /affinity in Windows Vista or higher (NOTE: not for XP). You can simply make a little batch file and start FFXI with it, to have it automaticly assigned to 1 core.

Create a new file and call it "launch.bat" (or whateveryoulike.bat). Edit it with notepad or whatever you like and place in:
start /affinity 2 launcher.exe
(for windower users)
or:
start /affinity 2 pol.exe

(The 2 after "affinity" is the core which it runs on. With this number it runs on the second core!)
If you use Windower, place the file in your windower folder, if you don't use, place it in your Playonline Viewer Directory. Make a Shortcut to your Desktop, add a nice name, and a icon to the Shortcut, and launch FFXI with this shortcut instead of the default pol or windower shortcut.

If you have an older processor, specifically a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading activated (which is a single core processor, but acts as 2 processors within windows), you may want to set core 1, cause core 2 is only a virtual core and slightly slower.

3. 3rd Party Tools
For Windows XP people, if you don't want to run Taskmanager every time, you can check out tools like "THG Task Assignment Manager" to assign pol.exe to a core kinda automatic.

I tried this on both of my systems. My PC, which is now completly lag free, and my laptop (Intel Core2Duo), which had this problem also, but not as much as my PC with the new processor. The laptop now also runs free of lags.
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I also think this might be a nice addition to dual boxers having a dual core processor and experience performance issues.

Make 2 Files
"Character1.bat"
start /affinity 1 launcher.exe

"Character2.bat"
start /affinity 2 launcher.exe

Use one file to login first character, other file to login second one.
This runs POL 2 times, limited to 1 seperated core each. (If you have a Quad Core you may also set them to 2 and 3)
I'm not dual boxing on 1 PC very often, since I normally use my laptop for the mule, but I tried it with these settings today, and both characters were running on full performance. No lagging, no issues

Sorry for the wall of text... I just thought this might help some people who experience the same, learned to "live with it" or recently switched their CPU also.

[Kohan]

This is a very nice idea, and I'm going to try it ASAP. Thank you for making the post.