Does it help or hinder?

The latest processor to pass through TechPowerUp’s gaming gauntlet is the Intel Core i9-13900K. They tested it on 53 games over the last decade to include DX11, DX12 and Vulkan in the results and tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4K. They also used an RTX 4090 for all tests to ensure they weren’t running into GPU limitations when trying to benchmark the CPU.

At default settings, the Core i9-13900K has 24 cores, eight of which are Performance and 16 of which are Efficiency, which led TPU to wonder if disabling them to ensure a game could only access on Hyperthreaded Performance cores will affect performance. As it turns out, it depends a lot on the game itself. The age of the game doesn’t seem to be a factor either, as Civ VI and Far Cry 5 both liked E-Cores off while DOTA and others ran better with them on.

The API doesn’t seem to matter that much, when they broke the chart on DX 11 only, there’s still a mixed set of results and the same with DX12/Vulkan. This seems to indicate that game developers haven’t caught up with Intel yet, and except for a few rare cases, you can leave your E-Cores enabled since games don’t really know about them yet.

It will be interesting to see how gaming performance evolves in the coming years.