PSA for owners of Asymmetric X3D CPUs: check your thread scheduling w/ Korea

[HybridHanger]

I use an AMD 9950X3D CPU, and noticed that the "Black Thursday" mission is CPU bound on my system. I then discovered that IL-2 Korea isn't detected by the Windows game bar as a game, and therefore it's not scheduling the threads on the correct CPU (the one with V-cache). Fixing this boosted my performance around 20% for the Black Thursday mission. It's still CPU bound, but it's performing a bit better on the X3D cores. 

Hoping this video helps others with a similar CPU.

 

 

[MajorMagee]

So others won't need to look it up. On the Ryzen 7 9800X3D all 8 cores (16 threads) have 96MB V-Cache so no need to change anything.

 

Edited Monday at 09:51 AM by MajorMagee

[=ILS=_Abu_27]

if 9800X3d needed to do thisi also ?

[AndreiTomescu]

6 hours ago, HybridHanger said:

L-2 Korea isn't detected by the Windows game bar as a game, and therefore it's not scheduling the threads on the correct CPU (the one with V-cache). Fixing this boosted my performance

the fixing part? disable the other cores from BIOS ? on top of poer plan and game bar

Edited Monday at 07:34 AM by AndreiTomescu

[Husar]

I'm glad that big bombers formation do not put so much load on CPU in multiplayer mission vs single player. In sp even my trackIR stops to be fluid when I'm close to bombers formation.

Edited Monday at 07:51 AM by Husar

[HybridHanger]

7 hours ago, =ILS=_Abu_27 said:

if 9800X3d needed to do thisi also ?

No, single-CCD AMD chips don't need to worry about the game bar detection part. It's only the asymmetric dual-CCD ones, where one CCD has the X3D V-cache and the other doesn't. 

Symmetric AMD dual-CCD chip owners are still advised to use the 'Balanced' power plan though, as that will still benefit the PBO and CPPC features. 

For Intel: From what I understand, Intel chips that have different core types (P-cores and E-cores) also need the power plan set to "Balanced", but don't need the game bar detection. 

[AndreiTomescu]

Please, HH, tell me, for a symetric AMD chip, 9700x, to be precise, why is "balanced" better than "high performance" ? Thx.

[FuriousMeow]

Supposedly with balanced and modern AMD cpus, the cpu will idle/downclock and boost dynamically while high performance leaves your cpu at max boost... however I do not see that. I'm using a high performance plan and my cpu idles and boosts just fine. 9800x3d currently, but saw the same with previous 5800x.

There was some "info" out there that the power plans influence threading performance. Balanced better for single threads, high performance for multi-thread but I don't see how that can possibly work. So take that with a forklift of sodium.

And here's a vid showing no difference 

This is only for power plans NOT the OP's asym x3d point which is very valid.

Edited Monday at 12:29 PM by FuriousMeow

[HybridHanger]

33 minutes ago, AndreiTomescu said:

Please, HH, tell me, for a symetric AMD chip, 9700x, to be precise, why is "balanced" better than "high performance" ? Thx.

I recognize that this can all be counter-intuitive. "High Performance" is an artifact from the past when CPU performance was bound only by peak frequency, vs. power and thermals like today. When you set the power plan to "High Performance", you're defeating Windows' ability to enable cores to sleep and power down cores. 'Balanced', conversely, lets Windows power down cores that aren't being used, letting it slosh power over to the cores that your game is actually running on. This has actually been a thing since the old Ryzen 1 days, which is why we used to have an "AMD Ryzen Balanced" power profile which has since been merged into the regular "Balanced" profile. 

"Balanced" does come with some inherent disadvantages, but they can be mitigated with finer-grained modifications of the power plan: the big one for me is "USB selective suspend setting", which I recommend you override to "Disabled" to prevent any issues with USB peripherals. You can also set "PCIE Express -> Link State Power Management" to "Off", which presents some situations that could induce micro-stutter.

 

The biggest problem with all of this is that some users have experienced certain processes forcing the power plan back to "High Performance". If you experience this, here is how you enforce the Balanced performance mode: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5569374/windows-11-pro-performance-mode-switching-issue

[HybridHanger]

16 minutes ago, FuriousMeow said:

Supposedly with balanced and modern AMD cpus, the cpu will idle/downclock and boost dynamically while high performance leaves your cpu at max boost... however I do not see that. I'm using a high performance plan and my cpu idles and boosts just fine. 9800x3d currently, but saw the same with previous 5800x.

There was some "info" out there that the power plans influence threading performance. Balanced better for single threads, high performance for multi-thread but I don't see how that can possibly work. So take that with a forklift of sodium.

And here's a vid showing no difference 

This is only for power plans NOT the OP's asym x3d point which is very valid.

A couple of things: 

1. This is only ever going to matter for CPU-bound cases, like in IL-2 Korea's Black Thursday mission when you get close to the B-29's. If you're GPU bound, avg FPS should be identical. Though you might get some 1% improvement with "Balanced". 

2. That video DOES show a difference (Balanced is higher performance), but again it's small:


As before, pay attention to the GPU utilization. These games are all around 95%+. The Black Thursday mission shows as 12%-70% (better on X3D vs. freq cores), in my case at least. The more CPU bound the game is, the more of an advantage the "Balanced" profile should show over "High Performance". 

Edited Monday at 12:39 PM by HybridHanger

[FuriousMeow]

38 minutes ago, HybridHanger said:

Spoiler

A couple of things: 

1. This is only ever going to matter for CPU-bound cases, like in IL-2 Korea's Black Thursday mission when you get close to the B-29's. If you're GPU bound, avg FPS should be identical. Though you might get some 1% improvement with "Balanced". 

2. That video DOES show a difference (Balanced is higher performance), but again it's small:


As before, pay attention to the GPU utilization. These games are all around 95%+. The Black Thursday mission shows as 12%-70% (better on X3D vs. freq cores), in my case at least. The more CPU bound the game is, the more of an advantage the "Balanced" profile should show over "High Performance". 

 

I'm not going to get into a drawn out thing with this, but you picked a single entry that shows some difference while most went either way and within the margin of error.

[AndreiTomescu]

Thank you, both. I'll switch to balanced, tuned as you said, and see how it goes. Note: in ryzen master my cores are shown as being put to sleep, currently i'm on High performance setting, since i had no idea about this. But i'm a bit of a freak about fine tunning, so i would like to try this on.

THX !  

[LuftManu]

Thanks for the video! While on press version I also did some benchmarks and as many other games, Ryzen CPU needs to know this is a game to use the cache CCD.

For 9800 / 7800 / 9850 users (Only one CCD) nothing has to be done.

Kind regards,

[Newbiefodder]

I have a 9950x3D and welI have been running a program called Process Lasso. It lets you tell which programs to use which cores on your CPU. For day to day stuff, you just leave it on a normal profile where every program can use every core. I have set it up so that it will detect when I run certain games, and go into a performance mode. All of my windows processes and background tasks switch to the non x3D cores, ONLY the game runs on the 8 physical x3D cores, and gaming adjacent stuff such as pimax software and recording software and the like run on the hyperthreaded x3D cores. I have gotten HUGE boosts to my gaming this way. It works for any processor too. You can set your game to be the only process on a number of cores, and all other background tasks to others. I've gotten double digit boosts to VR framerates from this alone! Try out process lasso. It can take a little to set up right, and you will have to look into best cores to use for your specific processor, but it will give you a lot of frames if done right. 

[HybridHanger]

15 minutes ago, Newbiefodder said:

I have a 9950x3D and welI have been running a program called Process Lasso. It lets you tell which programs to use which cores on your CPU. For day to day stuff, you just leave it on a normal profile where every program can use every core. I have set it up so that it will detect when I run certain games, and go into a performance mode. All of my windows processes and background tasks switch to the non x3D cores, ONLY the game runs on the 8 physical x3D cores, and gaming adjacent stuff such as pimax software and recording software and the like run on the hyperthreaded x3D cores. I have gotten HUGE boosts to my gaming this way. It works for any processor too. You can set your game to be the only process on a number of cores, and all other background tasks to others. I've gotten double digit boosts to VR framerates from this alone! Try out process lasso. It can take a little to set up right, and you will have to look into best cores to use for your specific processor, but it will give you a lot of frames if done right. 

Yes, for those who like to tinker, Process Lasso is an alternative here. You do need to be more careful though, as if you wind up in a situation where you cross-thread a given single process (some threads on one CCD, other threads on the other CCD), you can incur significant performance penalties.

1 hour ago, FuriousMeow said:

I'm not going to get into a drawn out thing with this, but you picked a single entry that shows some difference while most went either way and within the margin of error.

This stuff is super well documented, and has been since the Ryzen 1 era. As I mentioned before, the "High Performance" preset is a relic of the past, when CPUs were much simpler and almost always frequency-bound. That is no longer the case.

There are quite a few examples in his video showing Balanced beating High performance, as expected. And yes, many where it shows no difference: again, those are GPU-bound cases.

[Dash,Polder]

I've been using process governor, easy to set up with a very lite footprint, it never nags, requires no maintenance, and is automatically on when you require it.  It's a set and forget, prefer to keep my power plan at the max perform level for GPU purposes.

[HybridHanger]

34 minutes ago, Dash,Polder said:

prefer to keep my power plan at the max perform level for GPU purposes.

Curious what you mean by this. Other than the PCIE Link State Power Management setting (which as I noted earlier, I recommend setting to "Disabled" as a modification of "Balanced"), setting Power Plan to "High" or "Ultimate" should only degrade GPU performance in CPU-bound situations. Not help it. 

[reidarpeidar]

I have Process Lasso too and it actually restrains the il2series.exe by default. 

 

Is this article talking about the same thing as here? https://bitsum.com/docs/how-to-keep-processes-off-e-cores/

[reidarpeidar]

I tried the Process Lasso method, and wow, it really does wonders. With the following setup and settings, I'm now able to achieve a relatively steady 72 fps on Black Thursday in VR:

Ryzen 9 9950x3d

RTX 5090

PCIe5 SSD

Quest 3 running at full resolution (Godlike in Virtual Desktop)

No reprojection, spacewarp etc. No fake frames

DLSS to Quality, indirect lighting turned off, everything else on max.

What's most impressive is the effect this has on stuttering. While I would previously see drops down to 37, the worst I've seen so far is 61!

[HybridHanger]

On 7/7/2026 at 5:35 PM, reidarpeidar said:

I have Process Lasso too and it actually restrains the il2series.exe by default. 

 

Is this article talking about the same thing as here? https://bitsum.com/docs/how-to-keep-processes-off-e-cores/

No, E-cores are Intel-specific. Not sure why/how it would know to automatically restrain it though. Generally you'd want to restrain within one CCD in general (cross CCD incurs a performance penalty). 

[reidarpeidar]

15 hours ago, HybridHanger said:

No, E-cores are Intel-specific. Not sure why/how it would know to automatically restrain it though. Generally you'd want to restrain within one CCD in general (cross CCD incurs a performance penalty). 

Aha. Process Lasso has something called Efficiency mode and that was turned off by default for il2series.exe. Efficiency mode apparently means that the process runs on the part of the CPU that is most efficient but has less processing power.

It wasn't until I specifically gave il2series.exe exclusive access to CCD0 that I got this enormous performance boost.

[Husar]

On 7/8/2026 at 1:36 AM, reidarpeidar said:

I tried the Process Lasso method, and wow, it really does wonders. With the following setup and settings, I'm now able to achieve a relatively steady 72 fps on Black Thursday in VR:

Ryzen 9 9950x3d

RTX 5090

PCIe5 SSD

Quest 3 running at full resolution (Godlike in Virtual Desktop)

No reprojection, spacewarp etc. No fake frames

DLSS to Quality, indirect lighting turned off, everything else on max.

What's most impressive is the effect this has on stuttering. While I would previously see drops down to 37, the worst I've seen so far is 61!

Happy for you but it's still ridiculous on that hardware and low resolution in 2026 headset like quest 3. I mean medium resolution panels would be 2500 and high 3500/3800 pixel per eye.

[reidarpeidar]

13 minutes ago, Husar said:

Happy for you but it's still ridiculous on that hardware and low resolution in 2026 headset like quest 3. I mean medium resolution panels would be 2500 and high 3500/3800 pixel per eye.

Virtual desktop Godlike mode for the Quest 3 runs at 3072 × 3216 pixels per eye. So I am running a total of 6144x3216 pixels. That produces a significantly sharper image than the second highest level, which is still higher than the Quest3's native 2000x2000 resolution. 

Those higher resolution headsets are simply scams. Believe me, I have all the money in the world, and I would have bought one if I thought it enhanced my VR experience. What is much more important in a VR headset than the panel resolution are the lenses, and the Quest 3's lenses are superb.

 

 

[Husar]

46 minutes ago, reidarpeidar said:

Virtual desktop Godlike mode for the Quest 3 runs at 3072 × 3216 pixels per eye. So I am running a total of 6144x3216 pixels. That produces a significantly sharper image than the second highest level, which is still higher than the Quest3's native 2000x2000 resolution. 

Those higher resolution headsets are simply scams. Believe me, I have all the money in the world, and I would have bought one if I thought it enhanced my VR experience. What is much more important in a VR headset than the panel resolution are the lenses, and the Quest 3's lenses are superb.

 

 

You are not drawing more pixels that panel resolution, this more pixels are needed for a barbell distortion correction not super sampling. If you want that then set render resolution above 100% in desktop streamer app.

[reidarpeidar]

1 hour ago, Husar said:

You are not drawing more pixels that panel resolution, this more pixels are needed for a barbell distortion correction not super sampling. If you want that then set render resolution above 100% in desktop streamer app.

6144x3216 pixels is definitely much higher than the native resolution of the Quest3.