There's a reason most recommend leaving existing C++ redist runtime versions installed. Some apps you use may still require these version to run properly. I believe even Epic Games Launcher still installs c++ 2010 for example. It all depends on what apps/games are being used. I still play a game that was originally released in in 2010. This is why that c++ pack was created, to install all versions to raise compatibilitiy across the board.
Okay, so I ran into another 'stutter, lag, desync' issue and wanted to share to possibly help others experiencing the same problem.
This issue lies w/ a game originally released in 2010 and is a 2 thread application, Quake Live. I gave up on the other game I was trying to play because I concluded it's an issue only the DEVS can fix so it's not worth my time anymore, so here I am trying to jump back into Quake Live. In theory, the game should run flawlessly without a hitch, yet the game is clearly lagged, there's stutter, and everything feels like it's 500ms behind. It's just an awful experience. These Hybrid CPU's with how threads are scheduled just don't work properly with older games, it's infuriating. Through my troubleshooting, I discovered a couple of things.
1) Disabling E-Cores hurts performance and sometimes causes performance to absolutely tank. I ran latency and benchmark tests and found my memory and L3 cache latency would spike randomly if I disabled e-cores from the bios. My benchmark scores in say cinebench were also slightly lower. When E-Cores were re-enabled, memory and l3 cache latency dropped significantly along w/ my ring increasing a good amount. Here's a good article on this phenomenon. It's a bit long, but a good read. It's also good to note that my performance also dropped when even PARKING E-CORES. Absolutely ridiculous. It appears that e-cores are somehow directly tied to the performance of the chip's overall performance of the L3 cache, memory latency and even ringbus.
A review of the Core i7-12700K reveals that the presence of E-cores negatively impacts the performance of P-cores, but without them, the overall performance is even worse.
fox-laptop.com
2) Thread scheduling is ultimately broken and will not work correclty w/ legacy/older apps. Windows 11 is also a no go if you play older games because the thread director makes the problem even worse. You'll never get proper performance and responsiveness due to the broken thread scheduling.
So now on to the first problem. I have to make an older game/app work w/ E-Cores enabled. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this to work properly on Windows 11 due to the thread director. Setting core affinity unfortunately did not work to 'resolve' the problem, only alleviate the symptoms. Parking the e-cores made performance worse while spiking latency. The only option was to leave e-cores on and tweak the thread scheduling policies. So due to the thread director, I dropped Windows 11 and went back to Windows 10 so the thread director wasn't interfering.
Now on Windows 10, here's how I finally got this app/game to run properly without having to set core affinities or park/disable e-cores. First I disabled core parking, ensured 'Standard Core Parking (0)', was the enabled core parking policy, not 'Hetero Core Parking.' Hetero Core Parking wants to park/unpark p/e cores as it sees fit for the task at hand. I then changed the thread scheduling policy for both short and long threads to: 'Prefer Performant Processors.' After doing this, the game was no longer lagged, out of sync, and just worked. I went ahead and tested this configuration in other games and this seems to work in every game I've thrown at it, thus far. It's also good to mention that I gained 50 fps in the finals after using this configuration. This tells me that Windows 10 default thread scheduling doesn't work properly for all apps/games which I guess we already knew.
I guess the big takeaway of this post is that disabling E-Cores, as I was doing, can negatively impact performance. Latency will be higher and performance will suffer. This to me feels more like a bug, but who knows. After coming to this conclusion I researched and found that some were already aware of this discrepancy. Some users claim this is a bug and others claim this 'bug' doesn't affect every CPU, only some. Some claim that if you enable a single e-core, you won't get hit with the performance penalty, but that single e-core can negatively impact older/legacy apps. I can't say for sure, but it's definitely been a nightmare ever since switching over to Intel's Hybrid arch....
If anyone is interested in trying this, I recommend using QuickCPU. It's a great app to customize your core parking policies, thread scheduling policies, etc. It's a lot like ParkControl. It's far easier than unhiding all of the power plan policies in the registry.
Are you using a single 4 dimm kit or 2 separate 2 dimm kits? If using 2 separate 2 dimm kits together, that could be your issue. Kits are binned together, so you can't mix and match even if you buy 2 identical 2 dimm kits thinking they're compatible with each other. You'll run into all kinds of weird memory stability issues otherwise. Also, it's notoriously difficult to stabilize 4 dimm kits on DDR5 above 6000. What kit or kits are you using?
Cool, thanks for the post. I'll definitely install it.
Looks like it fixes stuttering when v-sync is enabled (Which I don't use) and scrolling in websites? Either way, good update looks like.