https://discord.gg/intelsubreddit /r/Intel is a community run subreddit to discuss anything related to Intel Corporation and their products. Come and talk about Intel CPUs (Core Ultra, i5, i7, i9, etc.), Graphics (ARC, Xe, UHD), Networking, OneAPI, XeSS, and all other Intel-related topics are discussed here.
Are E-cores used in gaming?
Discussion
I was just wondering whether E-cores are utilized in gaming.
Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
If you're interested I made a video recently testing this with my 13700K.
https://youtu.be/LcQUUmi3rWI
Tl:Dr keep the e-cores on.
this needs to be higher. theres a lot of people in this sub that regurgitate the "turn off ecores" misinformation.
Yes, E-Cores are used in gaming, I'm on Windows 11
https://i.imgur.com/aLe06Sq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/k9xRulY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2JJe6Vn.jpg
Usually not if thread director is working as intended. But they will handle a lot of background OS tasks which will free up more P cores to run the game.
I think in Spiderman I see them loaded. With roughly 80% of p-core thread performance*, e-cores are not that bad at all. *Don't quote me on that though, someone on this subreddit made a benchmarking.
Anything and everything will use e cores. It's up to the OS to efficiently manage which core is assigned to which process.
It’s unclear - they usually either handle background tasks or get loaded by the game before it dips into the SMT.
Yes and no. Some games will load them up fairly decently, some only lightly. Either way they handle the OS and background tasks while the P cores handle the game. Turning them off is just stupid and leads to absolutely no gain in performance, only loss.
No. Tasks in games need to be synced. You can't offload certain tasks to a slower core, it would slow the whole game down since it would have to wait for it to finish.
In fact this has been a common issue with e-cores, that some games use the ecores by mistake. I know the Star Citizen community has had to deal with this for a while, that the game would stutter because it tries using the ecores instead of the pcores. The fix is to disable the ecores entirely in the BIOS.
I would assume that Thread Director is supposed to do all it can to make sure that does not happen.