something's (possibly) fricky with the win11 process scheduler and 12th gen intel CPUs (p-cores/e-cores) (at least in my windows install)

I was debating whether to post this in slackernews or vidya but I'll take this opportunity to shit up a new hole instead

I've been trying to figure out the cause of massive average fps drops I started experiencing about a month ago. Originally I thought it was a bad graphics driver update until I realized it was CPU-related. Then I thought it was a thermal issue. But now I'm convinced that it was windows 11 deciding to dump games onto the e cores instead of the p cores. Forcing game processes to use ONLY p cores via processlasso last night essentially doubled my average fps in the games I was having issues with.

With the exception of fortnite, which uses an anti-cheat that blocks changing its CPU affinity

I finally bit the bullet today and fully disabled the e cores in bios, and now fortnite is working properly again. No noticeable performance loss in anything else.

Something similar to this issue happened a lot on windows 10 but win11 is supposed to be unaffected. As far as I can tell this is not a common problem and I suspect something may be wrong with my windows install. But if this fix continues to work then I can avoid the headache of a reinstall. I wish I knew what caused this, but in the course of rolling back and reinstalling every relevant driver from the past 6 months nothing changed. Could be a windows update, but I'd expect it to be more widespread if that were the culprit. Everything was running fine until about a month ago.

Adding this to the list of reasons why I will not be buying intel again for a long time.

tldr if you suddenly start having undiagnoseable performance problems on a 12th/13th/14th gen intel system (especially 12th gen), try disabling your e cores.