Steam – Escapists shows blank frame when launching Steam

If a game require Steam, there is no legal way of launching it without Steam running (I don't know about Reactor, but it should be the same thing).

On the other hand, there are way of reducing the memory and CPU consumption of Steam:

• Make sure to pause any downloads before starting your game (Steam should do it automatically, but better safe than sorry);
• Disable the Steam overlay (for just a game, right click on the name of the game, properties, uncheck the Steam community box. You can do it for all games in the option menu).

With this, you can keep Steam's memory consumption under 50MB of private memory, and cpu usage low enough to not worry on a dual core CPU.

Ok, I've run into the same problem with Steam games. The problem is that steam.exe spawns the game process, not Windows directly, and Steam doesn't pay any attention to the /affinity switch. So it can't reliably be set in the shortcut OR in Steam's "advanced" options. Whatever processor affinity steam.exe has, all games launched from it will also have.

The only way I've found to get a 100%-working solution is to use the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (free download from Microsoft). There is a fix called "SingleProcAffinity" which will guarantee that a process launches using only one CPU. It's a bit complicated to set up and get working the first time, but unfortunately it's the only solution I've found that doesn't make you go back to the Task Manager on every launch.