TECH NEWS – The Raptor Lake Refresh family of processors has a new feature that should make the new CPUs interesting for those looking to upgrade.

Intel’s Application Optimisation feature, or APO for short, harnesses the power of the hybrid architecture via certain P and E cores (P = performance; E – efficiency). The idea was inspired by Thread Director, an idea introduced by Windows 11: the operating system can process certain threads depending on the load in order to optimise performance. Intel has taken this concept and applied it to games, rather than video editing, for example.

“We now understand that some threads are in high demand at one time, but not so much at another. You don’t want to tax the CPU with that because it could affect performance and so on. So the next iteration is this. What APO does is we test the games and see, okay, this might benefit from a fine-tuning of the policy just because of the unique way this game behaves,” said Roger Chandler, Intel’s VP and GM, Enthusiast PC and Workstation, Client Computing Group via TweakTown.

We haven’t seen many test results yet, but some benchmarks have already appeared on Reddit. According to user LightMoisture, the process was long and confusing, but after downloading the Intel Dynamic Technology driver from the Microsoft Store, he enabled APO and got some surprising results. In Rainbow Six: Siege, he experienced about a “200 FPS” plus, as he got 867 FPS out of Ubisoft’s game, and he says his GeForce RTX 4090 was screaming quite a bit during this, which means it was being used to its full potential, as it needs a powerful proci, and he was using the Intel Core i9-14900K. It was running at both P- and E-core max. It saw a 32 per cent performance boost in Rainbow Six: Siege and 24 per cent in Metro Exodus.

So the feature is great, but for now we can only use it on 14XXX processors and in a few games. This could be extended in the future, but in the meantime, don’t forget about the power consumption!

Source: WCCFTech