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AMD Dual Core optimizer patch |
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Thursday, 26 July 2007 |
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 When I built my own funky new computer the video card came with a free game. It was Peter Jackson's King Kong and it sucked. The first thing you had to do in the game was climb some rocky stairs and enter a cave. Try as I might I just couldn't do it because the graphics were stuffed and the character would jump, stutter, go black and generally misbehave. Once or twice I did manage to enter the cave, but then you had to protect yourself against a heap of crabs, but because of the stuffed graphics you couldn't see the crabs and I kept dieing. When I built Donna's new computer Brad told me that Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) would go weird sometimes with his character changing to a different colour. He also had trouble with Knights Of The Old Republic (KOTOR) and Mount and Blade. When you do a Google search for these issues you find heaps of other people with the same problem, but it's really hard to find a solution or fix. Here it is (warning, techy geek talk coming up)! The one thing that was common between our two computers was that they both used an AMD X2 dual core CPU. There is a known problem with some games and dual core CPU's, and in particular AMD X2 dual core CPU's. If the game is written to bypass the operating system and obtain it's timing directly from the CPU, and the PC is using a dual core CPU, then sometimes the time stamp will come from one core and at other times it will come from the other core. Because the time stamps on the two cores aren't linked in any way this causes real issues for the game in question and results in poor graphics performance, incorrect colours, jerky movement and general bad stuff. If you Google for problems with the King Kong game you will find heaps of people saying that the game is garbage and should just be thrown out. That's not the case at all. All you need to do is download a simple little patch from the AMD website and all of your problems will be solved (maybe not all of your problems, financial, love, stress etc issues will probably remain). This official AMD patch synchronises the time stamps on both cores every now and then to ensure that games written for single core CPU's work properly. The AMD dual core optimizer patch (optimiser for us Aussies) can be downloaded from here. Just remember, this is only for AMD X2 dual core processors. If you have an Intel processor, or you just aren't sure, then don't install this patch. Good luck!
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