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The issue with games like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla arises either on launch or on load, because Denuvo thinks that the P-cores and E-cores belong to two separate systems, rather than two different core types on the same chip. Once it detects that some portion of the load has been split between the P and E cores, it sees the new cores as a new license holder (a separate system), and force-quits the game to prevent what it believes is two PCs trying to play one game on the same key.
We tested the CPUs here on their respective platforms in Windows 10 using a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti card. As you can see from our gaming runs above, things are actually quite close between the two processors, despite 12th Gen's ostensible platform and newness advantage. Between the two, the difference falls nearly within the margin of error for all tests aside from 3DMark, and that score is one that more accurately reflects the system advantage as a whole, rather than just the performance of the chip on its own.All models support up to DDR5-5600, or DDR4-3200 memory, up to 16 lanes of PCI Express 5.0, and up to 4 lanes of PCI Express 4.0.
In our more limited run of benchmarks on Windows 11 we did find that, in certain circumstances, Thread Director provided a sizable benefit. Sometimes the difference was negligible (for example, Cinebench R23, POV-Ray, and gaming tests all stayed roughly the same), while in others like the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere runs, we saw an improvement of nearly 30% in both benchmarks. Whether that means it's 30% faster in Windows 11 or 30% slower in Windows 10 is all a matter of your vantage point. Thread Director is informed by a new microcontroller on the CPU itself, which will feed Windows 11 more detailed hardware telemetry about the current status of the chip and its cores, versus older releases in Intel's desktop line. Information that was previously left a mystery to Windows—think aspects like thermals, power settings, and which threads can take more instructions—is now communicated to the scheduler in microseconds, leaving almost no impact and (in theory) adding considerable performance gains, depending on the workflow and the various kinds of overhead that can be leveraged. First up, CPU tests. We ran the various CPUs below (including the Alder Lake chips) under Windows 10, on appropriate testbeds built fresh for this generation of CPUs. (We also reran some of the tests on the Core i9-12900K under Windows 11 to get Thread Director into the mix.) With the introduction of hybrid architecture to the desktop market, however, Intel had to get creative. On a chip where the cores aren't homogenous, without a little extra help, Windows won't know which cores it can send programs to most optimally. Enter Thread Director.Overall, there's little contest to be shown here; overwhelmingly, the Intel Core i9-12900K, with its 16 available cores and 24 available threads, was able to beat out the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X's 32 threads in almost every content-creation task we threw its way. And that's without Thread Director in play. The 12600K comes with six threaded P-cores that operate at 3.7 / 4.9 GHz and four E-cores that run at 2.8 / 3.6 GHz, for a total of 16 threads. That's paired with 20MB of L3 and 9.5MB of L2 cache. Though we didn't run any benchmarks on the integrated graphics processor (IGP) of the Core i9-11900K (partly because of time constraints, but mainly because few buyers will shop for this chip and not pair it with a graphics card), we recommend hopping over to our review of the Core i5-12600K to see just how much of an improvement gamers can expect. For those looking for an IGP that can just drive a display, though, the Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 solution will support four 4K (up to 4,096-by-2,303-pixel) displays, at up to 60Hz.
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