But it'll do so by placing the efficiency cores on standby.

In the meantime, the company says it has come up with a workaround that can run any of the affected games on Alder Lake. Intel says it is working with game developers to roll out a software fix, although the company notes that some of the affected DRM-protected titles can run fine, so long as your PC is on Windows 11. It spans 51 games, including For Honor, Mortal Kombat 11, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as well as the Assassin's Creed: Valhalla game we observed the issue on. But on Thursday, the company published a list of every PC title known to it that has incompatibility issues with Alder Lake. Whether these would be marginal titles or blockbusters we did not know, as hundreds of games use the Denuvo DRM scheme. Intel was originally mum on which specific games were affected, making it unclear the scale of the problem the company cited '32' in pre-release briefings to the tech press. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.)

The errors occur because Denuvo's DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called 'Performance-cores' and 'Efficiency-cores' (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. The game would crash halfway through the test run, or simply not boot in at all. This was confirmed in our review of the Core i9-12900K when we tried to run the hit AAA Ubisoft title Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, part of our processor benchmark suite. An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Intel has posted a release that the hybrid CPU core architecture on Alder Lake can be incompatible with certain games, specifically some protected by the anti-piracy DRM software from Denuvo.

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