Intel Says Alder Lake CPUs Offer More Optimization for Games

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 21 August 2021, 09:08 am

Intel is leaning a lot on their upcoming Alder Lake CPUs early on, especially when it comes to gaming.

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ANTALYA, TURKEY - FEBRUARY 15: In this illustration photo Intel processor is seen in Antalya, Turkey on February 15, 2021.

In a report by WCCFTech, Intel is making a relatively bold claim: Alder Lake CPUs will be offering a lot of room for game optimization. As a result, this could lead to better gaming experiences.

This claim was made during the company's Architecture Day 2021, where they also unveiled tech such as XeSS (their answer to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR), and the purported final design to the long-anticipated Alder Lake CPUs which are due to release later this year.

Intel says that Alder Lake's gaming performance could be helped a lot by its dramatically different architecture. As Ran Berenson (the company's GM of Core and Client Development Group) tells PCGamer, they're focusing on letting people play games while there's another intense workload running in the background. This could be anything from recording a game, streaming it, or using a web browser.

But these are "indirect" benefits as Berenson calls them. The more "direct" ones come from the optimization benefits. Intel says that any game optimized to use multiple CPU threads (mostly modern ones) would benefit specifically on how the Alder Lake chips were built.

Intel Alder Lake: Something Better for the Future?

Intel seems like they're really confident with their upcoming Alder Lake CPUs. And perhaps they are onto something here.

For the uninitiated, the chips aren't going to be built the same way that Intel's built their previous chips (it's about time, really). They're changing it up this time by introducing the aptly named big.LITTLE architecture focuses on pairing several high-powered "big" cores with low-powered, high-efficiency "little cores." Hence, the name.

If you apply this to a modern PC gaming workload, this makes sense. As Berenson said, today's PC gamers want to do a lot of things at the same time. They could stream their game as they're playing/record it, maintain a Discord chat, and maybe even do a quick driver update in the background. Even the most powerful CPUs of today find this extremely taxing, but maybe not Alder Lake.

With the big.LITTLE architecture, tasks can be better allocated. The game itself would use the big cores, while the little cores would handle background tasks such as streaming, web browsing, or gameplay recording.

Alder Lake + Windows 11: Match Made in Heaven?

Since we're on the topic of gaming, remember that Windows 11 is "made for gaming," according to Microsoft. This means that there is a possibility of a better gaming experience if you play on Windows 11 using an Alder Lake CPU, because of the rumored performance boost for hybrid chips.

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UKRAINE - 2021/06/24: In this photo illustration a Windows 11 logo is seen on a smartphone and a pc screen in the background. Microsoft has presented Windows 11, new generation of Windows operating system (OS), during an event on June 24, 2021.

Intel's Alder Lake parts are considered hybrids. As of late, the performance boost did seem to be true (judging from tests that used the developer Windows 11 build), though improvements could be greater once everything is out on the market.

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Written by RJ Pierce