Intel’s latest Core Ultra200 series processors, even with the launch of the enhanced Plus model, still clearly lag behind AMD Ryzen X3D series flagships in gaming performance. In response to the hotly debated performance gap in the industry, Intel Vice President and General Manager Robert Hallock made a formal response in an exclusive interview with PC Games Hardware. He made it clear that the core reason for the gaming performance shortcomings of Intel hybrid architecture CPUs is not the hardware itself, but insufficient software optimization.
Hallock directly refuted the common statement that "energy efficiency cores (E cores) drag down game performance." Many previous hardware reviews have shown that after turning off all E cores of the processor, the game runs faster. But Hallock gave clear data. He said that the game performance of the E core and the performance core (P core) are almost exactly the same, and the performance gap between the two is only about 1% .
He explained that the root cause of performance abnormalities in some games is not the difference in core architecture. At present, many games and game engines still default to the same specifications and operating logic of all cores of the CPU. This cognitive bias will cause thread scheduling errors, core load imbalance, and unstable frame generation time, etc., ultimately reducing the gaming experience .
Hallock bluntly said that the entire PC gaming market, and especially the hard-core enthusiast group, seriously underestimated the importance of software to the PC experience . He said that faster hardware can indeed make the game run faster, but if the game is not specifically optimized for the corresponding CPU, 10% to 30% of the potential performance will be wasted .
According to reports, the thread scheduling of Intel hybrid architecture CPU is highly dependent on the built-in hardware thread scheduler. However, the final game performance will be affected by multiple factors such as the operating system, game engine, background processes, and power plan.
Hallock emphasized that the hybrid architecture has proven successful in multi-tasking and productivity scenarios, but to unleash the peak performance of games, it cannot rely solely on hardware upgrades. According to his judgment, as long as the bottleneck of software optimization is solved, the gaming performance of Intel processors has a chance to approach or even surpass the current leading Ryzen X3D series chips.
