Do you want to jump through senseless hoops just to rectify the woefulness of Intel’s Hybrid processor design?
We’ve covered previously how Intel’s Hybrid chip design incorporating Performance cores and “Efficiency” cores combined in a package that’s neither efficient or provides leadership performance, with Intel mitigating some of the gaming performance regression found on their processors since 12th Generation Alder Lake by boosting the core frequency of its E-cores with the Application Performance Optimizer.
Which was artificially segmented to 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors only.
Bitsum however have designed a program to “boost” performance of Intel Hybrid processors with their “Core Director” program which allows users to take control and simply restrict Efficient cores from being scheduled by certain apps (games).
Purely designed for Intel’s Hybrid processor design, the Core Director program aims to mitigate performance losses while gaming by simply barring its E-cores from utilization on specific applications, unlike Intel’s APO utility which requires a BIOS update to officially support only on their latest generation CPUs, this program works seamlessly on 12th Gen processors to current 14th Gen CPUs.
The application employs three primary methods of enforcement: “Efficiency Mode OFF,” CPU Affinities, and CPU sets.
Efficiency Mode OFF serves as a lenient enforcement measure, inhibiting threads from being automatically scheduled to the E-cores while retaining the option for E-core utilization if an application specifically demands E-cores or requires additional threads beyond what the P-cores can provide on their lonesome.
CPU Affinities impose limitations by confining all threads to the P-cores, except when an application explicitly demands execution on the E-cores.
Meanwhile, CPU sets operate as a moderately stringent enforcement method, positioned as middle ground between the other two options, leaving the decision entirely onto the Operating System itself.
To truly restrict Intel’s E-cores from being assigned it’s still recommended to utilize Bitsum’s other program, Process Lasso which works excellently across Intel and AMD processors to specifically target scheduling to high performance cores only or reserve background applications to a singular specific core.
It’s mainly utilized on AMD Ryzen X3D processors such as the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D to send threads to the specific CCD that features AMD’s V-Cache or 3D stacked cache.
CoreDirector is not intended as a substitute for Process Lasso however, it seems to serve as a more user-friendly alternative for tech illiterates alike. Bitsum explicitly suggests that users opt to use the much more robust Process Lasso software for managing Intel’s E-cores, but regardless they’ve still made CoreDirector for the community.
Considering that Process Lasso comes in both free and paid versions, the only reason you’d use Core Director is simply because you lack mental fortitude and intellect, there’s a reason why you bought a CPU that should genuinely work properly out of the box rather than needing for you to jump through hoops to boost performance by downloading programs to stop inferior core clusters from being assigned sensitive threads during gameplay.
