Why is my i5-14600KF choking during city expansion?
Managing a massive village is a nightmare when the screen starts hitching, especially during fast zooms. On the i5-14600KF, the hybrid architecture goes haywire during heavy AI pathfinding, dumping main threads onto the E-Cores. I saw my response latency swinging wildly between 25,0 - 42,0ms. I tried slapping on the 'Ultimate Performance' power plan, but that was a joke; it didn't stop the stutters and just pushed my CPU temps to a scary 92,0C. I eventually used a process affinity tool to force the game's main process onto the P-Cores and disabled E-Core auto-sleep in the BIOS. Checking with RTSS, my frame times tightened up from 18,0 - 45,0ms down to a rock steady 11,0 - 14,0ms. Interestingly, when I first tried disabling all E-Cores, my browser in the background started lagging like crazy, so I settled on limiting them to 4 cores. Now temps sit comfortably at 72,0 - 78,0C. Everything is stable and the scheduling is finally locked in.
