[Old Report] Dead Space 2 will crash on launch with more than 10 processors [ Edited ]

[Natefarious]

Dead Space 2 will crash on launch with anything more than 10 cores. It's fine with 10 cores or less. High-end gaming systems these days have LGA2011v3 six-core CPUs with hyperthreading, which means 12 processors in Windows, and so the only way to play Dead Space 2 is to either disable hyperthreading in the BIOS or use MSCONFIG and click on the Boot tab, "Advanced Options..." and set the "Number of processors" to 10 or less and rebooting (which of course means decreasing CPU performance for applications that can use those processors). I've submitted a bug report to EA, but the automated response I got indicates they prioritize fixes based on what customers are bringing to their attention, so please write to EA and let them know you'd like this fixed so they devote some resources to this bug.

[EA_Barry · Accepted solution]

@Natefarious

Thanks for your enthusiastic reply on this, we do appreciate it.

We have excellent SEO here on AHQ so anyone searching for help on this issue should be able to find this thread.

I will repost your workaround and mark this post as a solution/workaround for users with higher CPU core counts:

"Dead Space 2 will crash on launch with anything more than 10 cores. It's fine with 10 cores or less. High-end gaming systems these days have LGA2011v3 six-core CPUs with hyperthreading, which means 12 processors in Windows, and so the only way to play Dead Space 2 is to either disable hyperthreading in the BIOS or use MSCONFIG and click on the Boot tab, "Advanced Options..." and set the "Number of processors" to 10 or less and rebooting"

Note: we hope to be able to mark initial posts as a solution to an issue soon™

[EA_Barry]

@Natefarious

Due to the facts that this is a relatively old game and that a workaround is available for your issue in addition to this being a fairly niche scenario, I do not anticipate a fix for this being patched into the game.

[Natefarious]

Hi EA_Barry,

Thanks for replying, and as someone who worked at Rockstar Games for 9 years, I understand how the industry works. Visceral is probably in crunch right now working on their Star Wars game, and since Dead Space 2 came out 5 years ago, their coders probably don't have the last DS2 build or assets on a workstation ready to test which means there would need to be resources pulled from the Star Wars game just to get things set up to build, test and validate a fix, and I'm guessing the producers running the team over there don't have a lot of interest in diverting their resources right now (their EA overlords probably feel the same).

On the flipside, keep in mind that AMD's Zen Summit Ridge is coming out in a couple of months, and that means more enthusiast CPUs (16-processor CPUs to be exact) that Dead Space 2 is just going to crash on launch on (this is in addition to the high end Intel CPUs it's already crashing on). Enthusiasts aren't going to like learning they have to gimp their performance and reboot their PCs to play Dead Space 2 (and ironically Dead Space 1 does not have this problem!) EA should put up an FAQ page about this issue, and ideally the EA Origin client team should leverage the fact that they can check the processor count in a system and issue a warning to anyone launching the game that they're going to experience a problem if they have more than 10 processors, and ideally communicate the work-around to the user (could just be a link to an EA FAQ page).

Meanwhile, I'll reach out to some of the developers of third party D3D interceptors/wrappers and see if there's a way to create a DLL that can alter how many processors a particular application 'sees', which I think could work around this issue without involving any gimping of system performance (right now this is just pure conjecture on my part that this is possible, but since at least one other commercial title has a similar problem - Ubisoft's Child of Light - and I have a few hundred other games I haven't tested yet, there may be some utility to creating a more generalized solution since I expect most publishers and developers to be largely apathetic to the situation due to the economics of the gaming marking).

[EA_Barry · Accepted solution]

@Natefarious

Thanks for your enthusiastic reply on this, we do appreciate it.

We have excellent SEO here on AHQ so anyone searching for help on this issue should be able to find this thread.

I will repost your workaround and mark this post as a solution/workaround for users with higher CPU core counts:

"Dead Space 2 will crash on launch with anything more than 10 cores. It's fine with 10 cores or less. High-end gaming systems these days have LGA2011v3 six-core CPUs with hyperthreading, which means 12 processors in Windows, and so the only way to play Dead Space 2 is to either disable hyperthreading in the BIOS or use MSCONFIG and click on the Boot tab, "Advanced Options..." and set the "Number of processors" to 10 or less and rebooting"

Note: we hope to be able to mark initial posts as a solution to an issue soon™

[2712200316]

Another option would be to either opensource the engine or allow one of us to sign an NDA and get access to the source to fix it. Any chance of either happening?

[TheAlienOne]

I'd love to see if the DLL solution comes to fruition, because I have this exact same problem. I Run on double XEON processors, and this is the only game in my collection that has processor problems (and I play some games that are nearly 20 years old!). I do NOT want to go through gimping my system and restarting every time I want to play Dead Space 2, so any other solution someone else could  come up with would be much welcome, as I think this is the best Dead Space of the trilogy. As noted before, Dead Space 1 (and 3) do not have this problem.

[2712200316]

Just an FYI, I talked with EA support about the more than 10 cores issue and this is the response a rep named 'Prem' gave me; 'So as I have checked the work in progress list that we are currently working on. This is on the priority, The first question for the PCs with more than 10 cores and second for IOS . so you can expect it anytime very soon, As of now the work is being done on it to enhance the experience and its is almost completing stage.'

[h3llf1re2012]

I hope this problem gets solved some time. It's annoying to have to disable CPU cores just to play Dead Space 2.

[2712200316]

I hope so too. If I want to play on any other computer beyond this laptop, I have to disable an entire cpu socket to play. I can't figure out how something like this bug slipped past them. I'd never encountered a game/app that cared out how many cpus/cores/threads a computer had until this game. 

It'd be awesome if they also followed through with updating Dead Space for iOS like 'Prem' said so that one can buy and play it on recent iPhones or Android devices. I'd buy a copy for every iOS and Android device I have if they did that. 

That all being said, I suspect 'Prem' was merely telling me what he thought I wanted to hear just to end the support chat. It's been... how many years since Dead Space 2 came out? And they've known about this and a few other bugs all that time and didn't bother to fix it. I hope I'm wrong. Time will tell though. :/

[h3llf1re2012]

Just a thought: why is this thread marked as "Solved"? The issue definitely isn't solved, and disabling cores is a poor workaround for an issue that will (eventually) render this game unplayable for everyone who has upgraded to a modern processor.