CoreCage

Cage the background. Free the frames.

CoreCage is an open-source Windows FPS-boost app for competitive PC gaming. Its one rule: no placebo tweaks. Every optimization is either provably safe-and-reversible, or measured on your rig with PresentMon before you're asked to trust it. It's .NET 8 / WPF, fully EAC-safe (user-mode only — no kernel drivers), and every change is one button away from being undone.

Why

Most "game booster" apps ship a pile of registry tweaks and ask you to take the FPS gain on faith. Half of them do nothing; some make things worse. CoreCage refuses that. The flagship feature — Core Cage — reserves your top CPU cores for the game and confines every background process onto the rest, and the built-in Prove It benchmark runs a real before/after PresentMon A/B so you see the actual delta on your hardware.

The honest number

On one rig — Ryzen 5 5600G / RTX 3060 — Core Cage took Arc Raiders from 77 → ~150 fps, with 1% lows from 48 → 85. That is a measurement on one machine, not a guarantee. The whole point of CoreCage is that you don't take that number on faith: click Prove It and measure it on yours.

Features

CoreCage is built around seven feature pillars (several of them live together on the one-click Optimize page):

Pillar	What it does
Core Cage ⚡	The flagship. Reserves the top N logical cores for the foreground game and cages every background process onto the remaining cores via user-mode affinity. Whitelists the game, foreground app, audio engine, and protected system processes.
Gaming Mode++ ⚡	One-click pipeline: MSI interrupt mode, NIC hardening, GameDVR/Game Bar + background-UWP policy, QoS DSCP marking, EAC-safe IFEO priority, and core-unpark + perf floor.
Prove It (A/B benchmark) + Tweak Ledger ⚡	PresentMon-backed before/after benchmark of whatever's currently active, plus a ledger of every applied tweak and what it earned you. No claimed gain is un-measured.
Monitor 📊	Live CPU/GPU temp, RAM, and hardware read straight from the in-process engine. A dead sensor shows a dash — never a fake reading.
Tune 🎛	Advanced, opt-in hardware tuning (GPU core-offset auto-tune, power limit) — off by default, stability-gated. See safety.
Community Profiles 💾	Per-game tuning profiles. Drop a JSON file in profiles/ and PR it.
Big Red Button 🧹	Restore Everything — reverses every change CoreCage ever made, in dependency-correct order, and never throws.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• .NET 8 SDK to build from source
• Some features (registry, power plan, IFEO, services) require running as Administrator
• GPU auto-tune / power limit require an NVIDIA GPU (nvidia-smi); they're off by default

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/psgods101/CoreCage.git
cd CoreCage
dotnet build -c Release
dotnet test -c Release

That builds CoreCage.sln (Core library, WPF app, and test project) and runs the full test suite. CI runs the same two commands on windows-latest for every push and PR — see .github/workflows/ci.yml.

The WPF app (src/CoreCage.App) launches on Windows only.

Safety

CoreCage is designed to run on the same machine you play anti-cheat games on:

• No kernel drivers. Everything is user-mode.
• Never touches game memory. No injection, no hooks, no reads/writes into a running game. It tunes the environment around the game — priority, affinity, power, network — not the game.
• Every change is reversible. The Big Red Button restores power plan, timer resolution, DNS/TCP, QoS, NIC properties, priorities, affinities, and registry from snapshots, and never throws. Modes fall back to it if their own revert fails, so a partial revert can't strand your rig.
• Honest tiers. Safe tweaks (priority, affinity, timer, GameDVR, UWP) are on by default; hardware-write tweaks (GPU offset, GPU power limit, CPU SMU/ryzenadj) are Caution — off by default and searched conservatively.

Full posture and the per-tweak Safe/Caution table: docs/safety.md.

Contributing

• Community game profiles — the easiest way to help. Add a .json file to profiles/ describing how CoreCage should tune a game, and open a PR. The format, fields, and what actually drives runtime behavior are documented in profiles/SCHEMA.md. Include your measured before/after numbers as review evidence.
• New modes — CoreCage has a clean seam for adding a whole optimization mode (Coding, Streaming, or a private module) without forking CoreCage.Core: implement IModeModule and call ModeRegistry.Register. See docs/modes.md.

Please keep the project's core promise intact: no un-measured performance claims, and everything stays user-mode and EAC-safe.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.