Intel 12th, 13th, 14th Gen ISSUE/SOLUTION. The following will provide SIGNIFICANT improvement on frames. I had up to a 30% improvement or more depending on the area in WoW. This 100% WILL MAKE A HUUUGE IMPACT ON YOUR RAIDING, DUNGEONING, AND OPEN WORLD.
EXPLANATION OF THE ISSUE
This is for the 1700 chipset for Intel. The way Windows 11 handles the CPU scheduling it will place more demand on the E-Cores and less on the P-cores with WoW than what you would like. Specifically single core performance. And yes WoW uses multiple core but primarily it still depends on single core performance. Windows CPU scheduling is not the best it places WoW on the E-Core for its single core performance. I saw this on my 12600k and on my 14900k CPU’s. With my limited number of processors it might not be an issue for yours and you can skip the first solution if you don’t have the E-Core single core thread issue and your setup uses the P-cores automatically. Your lucky if you do but I haven’t saw that in my testing. All the tests I run show the E-Core maxed out when running WoW.
If you pull up Task Manager (while playing WoW) you will see one of your E-Cores maxed out and the others not utilized as much. On the i5, i7, and i9 cpu with E-cores you will see the E-core still being used when you are just chilling in town. On the i5 when you do things that require heavy cpu usage you will max all your cores because you simply don’t have enough. This is very pronounced on 8 P-core Processors. I have a 14900k and even with 8 P-Cores and 16- E-Cores WoW was still utilizing 100% of one of my E-cores. My P-Cores barely got utilized if at all.
I did some extensive research and testing and have came up with these two things that will help anyone with these Intel processors for i7 and i9. i5 users will only want to apply the first solution. There are 2 fixes that will greatly improve FPS.
SOLUTIONS
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Assign P-Cores to WoW and disable E-cores for WoW. A great application to do this is Process Lasso. You can Google it and find the link. Open WoW and then open Process Lasso. Within Process Lasso (there may be other applications that can do this as well) you can assign certain cores for certain applications. For WoW, assign ONLY the P-cores to WoW and do not assign any E-Cores to WoW. On my CPU this changed the utilization from 100% on one of my E-Cores to 100% utilization on one of my P-Core’s. My E-Core was no longer at 100% utilization but now my P-core is! Now it is using the superior P-Core over the E-Core. When more processes are needed the P-core utilization across all the active P-Cores I assigned will increase (which is what you want). This will significantly improve your FPS. I then uninstalled Process Lasso and my settings stayed the same. You may have to keep it installed. I didn’t keep it but you might need to.
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Go into BIOS and DISABLE HYPERTHREADING! Disabling Hyperthreading will result in a SIGNIFICANT improvement in latency, fps, and frametime. Your clicks will seem faster and the ingame reactions to them. Less jittery as well.
EXPLANATION/RESULTS/SUMMARY
Disabling Hyperthreading in conjunction with assigning your P-cores to handle WoW will mean that your P-cores will process more efficiently. Hyperthreading splits the P-Cores into two threads instead of one. Splitting the cores is great for heavy cpu tasks that will take advantage of the multiple threads. Geekbench and Cinnebench generate higher scores with Hyperthreading but not for games. Latency is also affected in a negative way with hyperthreading because with two threads there has to be an extra step after the process so that the correct process happens in the precise way. EX: P- Core with two threads gets four tasks. Tasks 1 and 3 to one thread and Tasks 2 and 4 to the other. The output will need to have the correct order of 1,2,3,4. If one thread completes tasks 2 and 4 first it will need to wait until tasks 1 and 3 get done then it will have to take an additional step to place them in the correct sequence. That will negatively impact latency and performance. Hyperthreading is very complicated and they got rid of that old technology in the current 15th gen Ultra Core processors for a reason. I encourage you to look it up on your own.
These two things will DRAMATICALLY increase your performance for WoW.
Bonus tip 1 unpark your cores with a program like CPU Unpark. This will mean all the cores are available and won’t have to “wake” to use them. They will be ready 100% of the time. It will use more power, but the performance gain is worth it. It will also smoothe out gameplay and have less stutters because the CPU’s don’t have to wake before they get used again.
Bonus tip 2. I do this for all my games and because of how Windows 11 handles Intel CPU scheduling (Windows does a poor job at it). I get FAR better performance than what benchmarks and media tubers will show; because, they use stock settings. Stock settings are holding back the performance of the 1700 socket due to scheduling with Windows.
DO IT!!! try one of the changes and see improvement.