I see there is a few people that remain convinced HT is a good thing for games. Despite the reports that when its turned off things improve.
To me there is an issue with scheduling (which I am not confident will be fixed by Intel), and the memory latency issue.
The windows scheduler which me and some others ramble about, is far from optimised. Some people still think a 2nd logical core is faster than a real e-core, this simply isnt the case. But the windows scheduler is somewhat stupid, I expect it still schedules on these chips like it expects the HT core to be there, I have observed it on my RL chip when I disable HT core scheduling. Instead of putting the extra thread on a different core, it just puts the extra thread on the same core instead of the 2nd HT core when HT scheduling is disabled, its dumb.
This problem however is mitigated by some manual tuning in the power scheduler settings, the heterogeneous policy 4 (windows 10 default) as an example behaves better than policy 0 (windows 11 default). I also think policy 1 is better than both 0 and 4. The rest of fixing it can be done with something like system informer or process lasso.
A big problem that Windows scheduler has, and I wonder if this will be part of the Intel fix, is if p cores are set as priority for foreground, the scheduler does not like to push extra threads on to e cores, this is pretty dumb, again it seems designed to assume HT is the way.
Intel are to blame for these issues, the same way I said AMD's issues they hold the blame for, to be fair to the Intel rep, he was pushed to blame Microsoft, but he said its all on Intel.
Productivity apps usually use e-cores and p-cores side by side ok, although certain scheduler settings will break this as well.
Also whilst some (a minor amount) of games will use up to 14 threads on consoles, its still much more common to be 7 or less.
