[SOLVED] How bad are Alder Lake CPUs for gaming?

Iso4

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I've been hearing that these CPUs don't play nice with games right now, and they require Windows 11 to take full advantage of their power which I am not interested in running. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off going with an 11th gen CPU?
 
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I've been hearing that these CPUs don't play nice with games right now, and they require Windows 11 to take full advantage of their power which I am not interested in running. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off going with an 11th gen CPU?
In common vernacluar something "bad" is actually the best. That applies to alder lake.
Today, because of the superior performance per core it is very good.

Windows today, know about the slightly slower performance of hyperthreaded cores and will allocate resources accordingly.
Windows 11 takes this further. It gains knowledge of running tasks via 12th gen hardware so it can make better decisions and keep high priority tasks off of the Efficiency cores.
E cores are each somewhat...

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I've been hearing that these CPUs don't play nice with games right now, and they require Windows 11 to take full advantage of their power which I am not interested in running. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off going with an 11th gen CPU?

Hello!

“How bad they are”?
Intel Alder Lake CPUs are actually the best gaming CPUs on the market right now!

There are a few bugs here and there, because it’s a totally new architecture, but they’ll get solved in time.

Win11 is actually stable.
 
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Iso4

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Hello!

“How bad they are”?
Intel Alder Lake CPUs are actually the best gaming CPUs on the market right now!

There are a few bugs here and there, because it’s a totally new architecture, but they’ll get solved in time.

Win11 is actually stable.

Thanks for your reply. I don't doubt that Win11 is stable, but I would prefer to continue running Win10. If I were to stick a 12th gen CPU in a machine and run Win10 would that work or cause problems?
 

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TommyTwoTone66

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A handful of games had issues with the E-cores and had to be patched. Intel also released chipset patches that fixed the issues. This was all patched like 2 weeks ago.

apart from that small blip, which is understandable on an entirely new architecture, they are the best gaming CPUs on the market right now. I used a couple of systems with a 12600K and a 12700K paired with a 3080 and they were both phenomenal.
 
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I've been hearing that these CPUs don't play nice with games right now, and they require Windows 11 to take full advantage of their power which I am not interested in running. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off going with an 11th gen CPU?
In common vernacluar something "bad" is actually the best. That applies to alder lake.
Today, because of the superior performance per core it is very good.

Windows today, know about the slightly slower performance of hyperthreaded cores and will allocate resources accordingly.
Windows 11 takes this further. It gains knowledge of running tasks via 12th gen hardware so it can make better decisions and keep high priority tasks off of the Efficiency cores.
E cores are each somewhat equivalent to I5 6600 cores.
The gaming issue comes when certain games try to identify the processor by looking at the core that is executing. The game code needs a patch, but the issue can also be resolved by disabling the E cores in the bios.
12th gen processors are some 19% stronger than 11th.
Silly to not take advantage of that, particularly for games.

Now, all that said, I see no urgent need to change to win 11. There will be some glitches as there are on every bit of new software. I would wait a bit on windows 11 as an upgrade to a running system.
On a new system, go ahead.
 
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I thought that Alder Lake managed better on Window 11 than Windows 10, because Windows 11 knows better how to manage the P vs E cores...

But, while there are a few exceptions with specific games, Alder Lake does VERY well for gaming.
Windows 11 can manage the cores better but that means that it will not always use all cores for your games while windows 10 being 'dumb' and not being able to distinguish will use all cores hence will have better performance in fringe cases.
 

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Thanks for your reply. I don't doubt that Win11 is stable, but I would prefer to continue running Win10. If I were to stick a 12th gen CPU in a machine and run Win10 would that work or cause problems?

It would work.
YouTubers such as Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed showed that there’s not a big performance difference between the 2 operating systems while being on an Intel 12th gen platform.

However, there is a number of games that won’t run well on Alder Lake right now.
But Intel is working at creating bugfixes for those games too.