sky_affinity

Affinity adjustment for ⛅ Sky: Children of the Light on AMD Ryzen 1000/2000/3000 CPUs

How to use?

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• 🧮 Make sure your processor is a subject of this, i.e. AMD Ryzen with "core config" is "2 × something".
• 🔗 Go to Releases page on the right
• 📦 Download sky_affinity.exe
• ⌨ Press Win+R, type shell:startup and run it.
• 📂 Your system users' auto Startup folder should open.
• 📦 Put sky_affinity.exe into this folder (you might not see .exe part if file extensions are hidden by your explorer settings, but that's OK).
• 🏃‍♀️ Next and each other time you log into the system, sky_affinity.exe will start and run in background.
• 🏃‍♂️ Run sky_affinity.exe, and it will run immediatly, no restart required.
• 🖥 A console window might flash for a moment, but that's OK. ⚠ If you use Windows Terminal, then sky_affinity.exe will open there and WILL NOT run in background. 🤷‍♂️

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Как этим пользоваться?

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• 🧮 Убедитесь что у вас соответсвующий процессор, а именно AMD Ryzen где "core config" с "2 × что-то".
• 🔗 Перейдите на страницу Releases справа.
• 📦 Скачайте sky_affinity.exe
• ⌨ Нажмите Win+R, вставьте shell:startup и запустите.
• 📂 Должна открыться папка Startup автозапуска вашего пользователя системы.
• 📦 Закиньте sky_affinity.exe в эту папку (вы можете не видеть .exe если у вас в настроках проводника выключено отображение расширений, но это нормально).
• 🏃‍♀️ При следующем запуске системы sky_affinity.exe автоматически запустится и будет работать в фоне.
• 🏃‍♂️ Можете запустить sky_affinity.exe прямо сейчас, тогда вам не придется перезагружаться.
• 🖥 Может мигнуть консольное окно, но это нормально. ⚠ Если вы используете Windows Terminal, то sky_affinity.exe откроется в нём и НЕ БУДЕТ работать в фоне. 🤷‍♂️

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Technical information

Read below only if you are nerd ☝🤓

How does it work?

It passively monitors whether Sky.exe is running and ensures its CPU affinity is set to the second half of threads. So, if you have CPU with 12 threads (logical cores), it will lock Sky.exe to cores 7-12 (6-11 if counting from 0). The Windows scheduler should handle the rest. Preferring second half over first half as some other software likes to bind itself to the first core for some reason.

Why does this work?

On some older generation AMD Ryzen CPUs (mostly 1000/2000/3000 series) there is some latency when communicating across some cores. This is because there are actually two "chips" under the hood and communicating across those "chips" is slower than within a single. The game or Windows scheduler (not sure who exactly) can split its threads to differint "chips", which causes slowdowns and stutters some times. Sky: Children of the Light isn't performance-heavy and runs fine on 2-4 cores. So, we are locking the game into last half of cores, which usually belong to one "chip". This fixes stutters and lags on some systems. See core-to-core-latency project page for more info and use cases. You can measure delays by yourself! Tested and confirmed on AMD Ryzen 2600 CPU.

Notes

• It works in background, if you want to shut it down, kill all instances of sky_affinity.exe in Task Manager.
• It checks affinity periodically, so you or other software can't override affinity while sky_affinity.exe is running.
• The game normally runs as non-elevated process (with no admin rights), if you are running Sky as admin for some reason, then sky_affinity.exe will also need to be run with admin rights manually.
• The game needs at least two logical cores to run properly, so if your system has less than four logical cores, it will do nothing and exit.
• If you run another instance of sky_affinity.exe it will kill already running one.
• You might see there is actually two copies of sky_affinity.exe is running. That's OK. That's overhead of Nuitka: one is the lanucher other is the program itself.
• If sky_affinity.exe can't be run for some reason, try to run it trough cmd.exe (console), there is should be more verbose errors.
• If you use Windows Terminal, Nuitka fails to hide console window, so new tab will be spawned and lasts all the user session. 🤷‍♂️ Not really want to make workaround for that lmao.

How to remove?

• Go to Task Manager (press Ctrl+Shift+Esc).
• Kill all instances of sky_affinity.exe in Task Manager.
• Open Starup folder (press Win+R and run shell:startup).
• Remove sky_affinity.exe from Startup folder.

Have a nice day! 💐