Windows 11 CPU Priority and Multiple Instances

[Hexero]

Curious as I have done a considerable amount of searching on this topic and haven't found any meaningful information or answers.  I regularly run 2 instances of the client and recently, one of the clients crashes or just force closes itself regularly.  By regularly I mean it could happen in a variety of different time frames (instantly, 10 minutes, hours).

 

After so many times of it happening I began attempting to look into the problem and quickly learned that I could not change the priority of the CoH process in task manager from anything other than Normal (while game has focus) or Below Normal (when alt-tabbed from client).  Admittedly, I have recently been using process lasso to save process priorities.  I am no genius when it comes to that piece of software but I am aware that it includes a lot of power balancing and auto adjustment features when it comes to managing cpu priorities.  I went through the program and diasbled all the aforementioned features and attempted to manually set the priority to High and saw that it immediately returned to Normal or Below Normal.

 

I still suspected it had something to do with process lasso so I uninstalled it with Revo Uninstaller Pro and rebooted.  I opened one instance of Homecoming and tried to set cpu priority for cityofheroes.exe to High and saw that it still would not change from Normal or Below Normal.  Anyways, I can't help but think that this is the reason my extra instance of the game is terminating itself if it is automatically setting the process to Below Normal priority while alt tabbed away from it.  Also, I prefer and always have liked to set any game I play to High priority and it's frustrating having this option taken away from me.

 

Does anyone else have this problem?  If so, how did you fix it?  Is it something built into the homecoming process itself or a feature of Windows 11 I am not aware of?  Thanks in advance to anyone with any insight.  

[GM Impervium]

As far as I'm aware, Windows 11 is weird about setting programs to "high priority", because when you have Task Manager open, THAT is the active program, and anything else (like CoH) is technically in the background. Task Manager might remember your setting and set CoH to high once it's closed, but if you're multiboxing, it would only do this for the active instance. And also, that would be impossible to prove without... opening task manager and forcing CoH back into the background and making it lose priority again.

 

Also, I believe there's an ingame setting that deals with this sort of thing, but I'm not at my PC to double check. Try looking there.

[WanderingAries]

I'm not entirely sure how that function really works in Task Manager (beyond what it says), but I've never found changing the priority to benefit, no matter what app I tinker with it for. In fact, I've seen it lockup a system when I put something too high of a priority (usually Realtime).

 

As for the game itself, I'd suggest putting the following under "Extra Launch Parameters" for at least the live version. This will make the instance you're Not using lower its current FPS to 5 (I guess you could put it to 0?) so that it's not taxing the GPU. Now granted, I doubt your GPU is necessarily going to have an issue handling multiple instances, but this helps the workload a bit (or so it did back on live).

 

-maxinactivefps 5