Is the i5-13490F E-Core scheduling ruining Tales of Arise?
My combat was smooth as silk until it suddenly started skipping frames, which is a nightmare when you're in the middle of a boss fight. Checking the logs, I found that some game threads on my Intel Core i5-13490F were being dumped onto the E-Cores, causing the single-core clock to tank from 5.0GHz down to 2.4GHz. The frame time jumped from a clean 16ms to a disgusting 45ms instantly. I tried enabling 'Ultimate Performance' in the Windows power plan, but while the P-Cores stayed stable, the E-Cores kept stealing the workload. That failure taught me I had to go deeper. I booted into BIOS, navigated to Advanced CPU Settings, and just nuked all the E-Cores, locking the P-Cores at a flat 4.8GHz. Looking at the RivaTuner graph, the frame time tightened up to a tiny 16.2ms - 16.8ms window, and the stuttering vanished. One downside: disabling E-Cores bumped my idle power draw by about 15W, which I only fixed after tweaking the C-State power management. CPU temps sat between 62℃ - 75℃. The scheduling logs now show perfect thread allocation, with temps holding steady at 62℃ - 75℃.
