At some point in the past, the EverQuest2 process was changed to set affinity to the system's highest core. At the time, this change was made to improve performance by reducing competition for the lowest core, preferred by Windows processes. With the introduction of efficiency cores (E-cores) on 12th gen and newer Intel CPUs, the highest cores are now a fraction of the performance as the performance cores (P-cores) that make up the lower logical CPUs. For instance, on an Intel i9-12900K CPU, logical processors 0-15 are the 8 P-cores (assuming hyperthreading is enabled) and logical processors 16-23 are the much lower performance E-cores (no hyperthreading on 12900K E-cores). The performance impact of running the game on an E-core results in about half the frame rate vs. running on a P-core. The EverQuest2 executable does not respect manual changes to core affinity, reassigning itself back to the highest core shortly after being changed. In order to realize maximum performance on these CPUs, you must disable the E-cores in the BIOS. It would make sense to allow users to specify the core(s) used by the EverQuest2 executable either through the in-game options or .ini settings. Alternatively, but slightly less effective would be to at least make it respect changes to affinity through task manager.
Profile Lasso sadly does not help. Only way to solve this seems disabling E-Cores Just for information the link to the thread of last year: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/eq2-on-12900.602559/
I don't think you're going to see a 'fix' to this without the engine for EQ2 being rewritten, though admittedly I don't know the ins and outs of it quite well enough to be sure. The game is older than true multi core CPUs and it is *probably* a big task to enable it.
This really shouldn't require a major effort. They literally changed it last time a patch or two after the issue was raised at Fan Faire. At the time it was just flipping it from grabbing the first core to grabbing the last core, even going back to the first core would be better than the current setup. Best case would be letting us bind to a specific core in options, but I'll settle for just not picking the worst core.
GPU and really multicore is not really necessary and I think we will not get it. The brute force binding of the EQ2 graphics engine to the highest CPU core every 2 seconds was a nice thing a decade ago but with the actual CPUs the operating system should have the possibility to switch so this force feature should be disabled in EQ2 core. This should be an easy thing
PLEASE FIX THIS and let windows decide which core is needed Test on a 13900K: Force only P Cores: 240+ FPS @ 8 P-Cores @ E-cores enabled.... All cores (overall 22 cores): 124 FPS so EQ2 enginge runs on the highest E Core This really is (to be polite) a bad result
I am running a 13900k and similarly negatively affected. The current methodology is a joke of a hack to mitigate non-issues of a bygone era and the idea that this cannot be explicitly configured is obscene and offensive as a user. I think we should start a petition if this doesn't get developer attention because this practice is effectively what I would expect to see from malicious software and is outright hostile to users.
