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

9 years ago

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
Community Manager
9 years ago
@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
  9 years ago
  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?
  - 2712200316
    7 years ago
    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.'
- RayzCom13
  3 years ago
  Please update the game so the game is playable on windows 11, windows 10 etc. The game wont launch.
- RevT0m
  Newcomer
  3 months ago
  How is this the solution? That's pathetic
TheAlienOne
8 years ago
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.
d0x360
New Rookie
7 years ago
@Natefarious So use bills2 process manager and make a rule that the game is only allowed to use 10 cores. It lists multi threading cpu threads as cores so it would show a 6 core i7 as 12 cores.

All you do is uncheck the boxes so for a 6 core cpu with 12 threads you would check core0 core 2 core 4 core 6 core 8 and core 10.

That would have the game run on the main thread of each individual core

That being said I have an i7 5820k which is 6 cores 12 threads and I've never had an issue with any dead space game and I don't disabled anything
- TheAlienOne
  7 years ago
  
  That being said I have an i7 5820k which is 6 cores 12 threads and I've never had an issue with any dead space game and I don't disabled anything
  That's because you only have 6 cores. As stated in the thread, this problem occurs if you have more than 10 cores. Unlike what that program you suggested indicates, a thread isn't the same as a core. So, it's not surprising that you haven't had any issues because you don't have the amount of cores (11+) that would cause the problem indicated in this thread.
  That said, thanks for the program suggestion nonetheless, because that may save me some hassle rather than going the other "fix" route indicated in the thread.
  - h3llf1re2012
    7 years ago
    Decided to spend some time on this issue this weekend and I have managed to create a workaround that doesn't require you to gimp your PC and reboot.
    Link to file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OglTev8mpgwgikXHpiy3HifnS8F9aSsJ (would not let me attach it to this post.)
    ----Instructions----
    Extract these files into the Dead Space 2 installation directory (the same folder as deadspace2.exe) and run the game.
    Important: If you extract the files with the Windows zip tool, be sure to unblock them after extraction (right-click each file - Properties - Unblock).
    ----Disclaimers----
    - This is a custom build of DXWrapper (https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper) that I created specifically for Dead Space 2. I am not affiliated with the original developers of this wrapper.
    - I have virus scanned these files and they are clean, however you should always scan downloaded files yourself.
    - It works by intercepting the exceptions raised by the process and allowing execution to continue. This is not an alternative for EA fixing the damn game - I still hope they will do this one day.

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

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