Atlas Fallen is the latest game to mistreat Intel’s hybrid core processors. The 12th and 13th Gen Core processors see substantial improvements to in-game performance when the E-cores are disabled. The Raptor Lake-S flagship is up to 50% faster with the 16 E-cores switched off. This behavior is replicated on DirectX 12 and Vulkan, indicating a fault on the developer’s side.
Atlas Fallen runs relatively better on Vulkan, at least on NVIDIA hardware. With all the cores (P and E) enabled, the GeForce RTX 4090 + Core i9-13900K combo nets 152 FPS at 1080p Ultra with Vulkan, up from 136 FPS with DX12.
Disabling the E-cores pushes the performance to 187 FPS with DirectX 12, a smidge lower than the 197 FPS average on the Vulkan port. A closer look at the scheduling reveals that the game specifically assigns the game to the E-cores instead of the P-cores.
In an ideal situation, the render thread of the game would be assigned to the P-cores leaving any background processes to the E-cores. Unfortunately, we see the opposite happening in this case. Luckily, you can simply change the affinity of the cores to bypass this issue or simply disable them. If you found this post interesting, you might want to check out Intel’s plans to replace hyper-threading with a more efficient design.
Source: TechPowerUp.
