Dawn of War 3 CPU Affinity Fix for some CTDs on newer CPUs

Jaghatai_Khan

Sega Support has directed me to post this possible solution on official forums. I still have issues but they are different issues now.

Originally, I had the following original issue:
1. Dawn of War 3 would get to the main menu.
2. However, any BATTLE or actual skirmish (such as Tutorial, Campaign, or even the Performance Test) would simply not run and CTD back to desktop
3. Under Steam, it would just close up shop. Saying Syncing, and then Shutting down.

What seemed to fix the above (partially, because I still get random CTDs sometimes only a minute or so in, sometimes longer 10-20 minutes, but fairly soon, the same boot/CTD)

Eurkea! I have discovered some lift off!

Ok, what seems to be helping is setting CPU core affinity for Dawn of War 3. Basically, I explored the following thread and software:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/how-to-permanently-set-cpu-affinity-on-windows-10.2827069/
and installed the folloinwg software, Project Lasso
https://bitsum.com/

1. Opened up Project Lasso
2. Went to Options
3. Under Options, clicked "Configure default CPU affinities..."
4. Type in the executable name for Dawn of War 3, in this case "RelicDoW3.exe"
5. Check CPU 0 and CPU 1 (any more like checking CPU 3 back to the CTD/crashes before).
   Note: I found that more stable was just CPU 0, not anything else checked on.
   Also helpful was to add the full path to Bitsum's Performance Mode override
6. I also check "More strictly enforce default affinities"

Seems like modern CPUs need software like Project Lasso in order to force a default (usually smaller, only 1 to 4 CPU core affinities for older games to work)

I tried CPU affinities at 1, 2, 3, and 4 for Dawn of War 2: Retribution, but still the same issue of freezing and "Not Responding", so this CPU fix did nothing for the Dawn of War 2: Retribution title. So I'm still lost there. That's a separate issue.

At least, now I can play a bit, though brokenly. And with the tutorial so far... every time a new objective is passed, it seems like it no longer CTDs on something "visited" but only on new "chapters"... which leads me to suspect perhaps SSD not working well with this CPU affinity, but I dunno.

I'll try placing the game back on HDD along with this CPU affinity fix.

So not out of the woods completely yet, but finally real progress! I'd appreciate chatting with a developer of this game, somebody at Relic as well, if at all possible. I really want to get to the bottom of this.

PS: My system
OS: Windows 10
CPU: MD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core Processor (64 CPUs), ~4.1GHz
RAM: 32 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
VRAM: 11 GB
C Drive: 2 TB SSD (OS and most games installed)
E Drive: 2 TB HDD (all my mods and backups)

Jaghatai_Khan

Eureka! I've finally fixed it. I can play without any issues now. Here was the fix:

Bitsum's Project Lasso only worked intermittently. Very unstable, since had to FORCE the AMD Ryzen Threadripper to stay on just a few cores.
No true/actual/supported Compatibility for older games.

Thus, I resorted to official AMD Ryzen Master software was the only solution that actually STUCK and FORCED compatibility mode. Basically, Legacy Compatibility Mode must be turned on via AMD Ryzen Master.

Also, I updated my AMD chipset drivers from 18.30 to 19.10, so that too probably helped.

Lastly, I got rid of both Bitsum's ProjectLasso and CorePrio, and from now on sticking only with official AMD drivers and software only. No 3rd party software.

Hopefully this would help any other folk with higher CPU cores that messes up older games. Cheers! Moderators can close this thread as RESOLVED.