Monday, November 13th 2023
MSI Readies BIOS Update for 14th Generation Intel Core Processors to Enable APO
According to the discovery made by @ghost_motley on X/Twitter, we have information that MSI is starting to roll out BIOS updates to accommodate Intel's Application Optimization called APO shortly. This update, however, comes with significant restrictions. Intel APO, designed to enhance performance, is exclusively compatible with 14th Gen Intel CPUs, leaving owners of previous-generation Intel processors, mainly the closely comparable 13th Gen, without this benefit. Intel's APO is an extension of its Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) specifically for gaming. It is available on select 14th Gen Core processors like the i9-14900K/KF, enhancing workload distribution across hardware resources like P-cores and optimizing them for peak frequencies.
As noted, the current rollout of Intel APO support is limited, namely to the Intel Core i7-14700K, i7-14700KF, i9-14900K, and i9-14900KF, excluding the Core i5 series. This omission is significant given APO's focus on boosting gaming performance, a feature that would be highly beneficial to Core i5 users. However, the feature is currently supported by only two games: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Metro Exodus. The frame rate improvements in Rainbow can be as high as 13% while also boosting Metro Exodus FPS by 16%. Whether we will see more APO-optimized games or not, owners of MSI motherboards have received their updates and are ready to enjoy the FPS increase.
Sources:
@ghost_motley (X/Twitter), via Tom's Hardware
As noted, the current rollout of Intel APO support is limited, namely to the Intel Core i7-14700K, i7-14700KF, i9-14900K, and i9-14900KF, excluding the Core i5 series. This omission is significant given APO's focus on boosting gaming performance, a feature that would be highly beneficial to Core i5 users. However, the feature is currently supported by only two games: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Metro Exodus. The frame rate improvements in Rainbow can be as high as 13% while also boosting Metro Exodus FPS by 16%. Whether we will see more APO-optimized games or not, owners of MSI motherboards have received their updates and are ready to enjoy the FPS increase.
56 Comments on MSI Readies BIOS Update for 14th Generation Intel Core Processors to Enable APO
It's a refresh. AMD has done this before. Don't start drama.
Of course most people are not dummies so APO is an attempt to add more ‘features’ and up sell 12 and 13 gen customers.
But ultimately until someone tries this out and actually analyses what its doing then we dont know what it is doing.
For permanent affinity, I dont use lasso (paid software), I am using process hacker (system informer). But I dont really touch games on it, instead I am using it to route stuff I dont want to conflict with games to be forced onto e-cores like most of the svchost processes (but not all of them), browser, and some other background stuff that has high cpu time.
For a more optimal baseline scheduler I set the windows scheduler to "prefer performant cores". That is better than the "use performant cores" as the latter pushes everything on to the p-cores and you will notice things like cpuz and cinebench single threaded scores go down because of competing svchost etc., whilst prefer performant cores has some intelligence about it and moves background stuff of p-cores to make room for foreground interactive application, so thats the one to use.
This is with a 3080 too, with a faster GPU the differences would be more pronounced.
The 12th, 13th, and 14th gen are all the same arch. The 14 is literally a 13 with different C states tuned in. There is no reason APO should be artificially restricted to 14th gen chips.Only if you are intel. AMD over here delivering 10%+ between gens for the last 7 years now.
I'm saying, apo only working on 14th gen is better than non apo at all.
To make it clear, I think this should be working on every CPU for that socket, so all 12th gen, all 13th gen and all 14th gen, it only working on a few 14th gen SKU's is artificially restricting it.
The problem with this tech is 1) it's for 2 games only, and needs to be added game by game, and 2) it's for an architecture that is going to be replaced in a matter of months, so how long will this last? maybe 2 years, maybe there's 20 games added.... tops. meh.
It does show the potential for better software optimizations, however.