Hybrid CPU and good isolation/pinning practices for gaming

[tulkas]

I will soon receive an Intel i7 13700 (8 P cores, 8 E cores) to hopefully configure a 1 tower 2 gaming VM setup (nothing else, no docker, no NAS, ...).

 

My plan is the following :

• 4 isolated P cores (+ HT) for the first VM + 2 isolated E cores for the emulator (emulatorpin) + RTX 4070 ;
• 3 isolated P cores for the second VM + 1 pinned-only P core (cpu 0 cannot be isolated to the best of my knowledge) + 2 isolated E cores for the emulator + RTX 4060 ;
• 4 E cores for UNRAID.

 

My questions are the following :

1. Since the host should not be too busy, is it a good idea to pin the first unisolated P core to the second VM ? or shall I expect performance drop anyway ?
2. Would one isolated E core per VM be sufficient for handling emulation stuffs (emulator pin) ?
3. Would it be a good idea to isolate+pin additional E cores to the gaming VMs ? Do UNRAID and/or guest and/or gaming apps handle hybrid CPU correctly ? I've read a lot on that topic, but nothing very recent.
4. Are 4 P cores / 8 T sufficient for running recent AAA titles ? Max resolution will be 2K.

 

Any other suggestion ?

 

All the best,

[tulkas]

Hello,

 

Do you think installing a tool such as https://github.com/sas41/ProcessAffinityControlTool within the guest could help ? In theory, it could allow games to be automatically pinned (affinities set) to P cores even if the guest OS itself has no information about them (of course E cores would still be there for background tasks).

 

All the best,