Intel is trying to shift the debate over gaming performance toward a point that gets less attention: software. According to a report from Tom's Hardware, Robert Hallock, Intel's vice president in charge of its enthusiast business, argues that many games today lose 10% to 30% of their CPU performance because they aren't properly optimized for hybrid architecture. For people who use gaming or high-performance laptops, this detail matters, since most newer Intel machines mix P-cores and E-cores. It also means the gaming experience is determined not only by hardware, but also by the game engine, Windows, BIOS and drivers.
Why Intel Thinks Games Still Aren't Making Full Use of Hybrid CPUs
In an interview with PC Games Hardware, Hallock pushed back on the idea that simply turning off the E-cores makes games run better. By Intel's reasoning, the raw performance gap between P-cores and E-cores is not that large in many situations; what skews the experience more is how a game divides its work across threads and how the operating system schedules tasks. In short, a hybrid CPU is not necessarily a weakness. The question is whether software has caught up with that design.
This ties into the early days of Intel's first hybrid chips, when it sometimes felt like only the P-cores could be trusted, because Thread Director, the Windows scheduler and even the underlying platform hardware were still immature. After a few generations, Intel believes the bigger bottleneck has moved to game optimization. Even so, the 30% figure should be read as performance lost in certain CPU-bound scenarios, especially eSports games running at 1080p and high FPS, not as a promise that every laptop will gain that many frames after a single update.
How Gaming Laptop Buyers Should Look at This
For gaming laptop buyers, the key takeaway is not to wait for perfect software before spending money, but to stop treating the CPU as the only factor. A model with a stronger Intel chip on paper can still feel less stable in games if its BIOS is poor, its RAM is a bad match, its cooling is weak or the manufacturer is slow to issue updates. Conversely, a more balanced configuration that is well optimized can sometimes hold FPS steadier with fewer stutters over a long play session.
| What to look at | Practical meaning |
| Hybrid CPU | Not every game makes equally good use of P-cores and E-cores. |
| BIOS, drivers, Windows | Software updates can improve stability and sometimes FPS as well. |
| 1080p, high FPS | These settings expose CPU limits more readily than 1440p or 4K. |
| Cooling, RAM | These two factors determine how long a machine can sustain its performance. |
This also explains why Intel continues to pursue hardware routes to higher performance in parallel, such as Nova Lake bLLC cache. A larger cache can make games less dependent on data access latency, but that is still only half of the problem. If an engine doesn't know how to use the different groups of cores properly, the performance already available from a hybrid CPU is still left behind.
For users of newer Intel laptops, including models beginning to move to Core Ultra Series 3, the more sensible approach is to look at the whole platform instead of just counting cores. Favor machines with regular BIOS updates, stable drivers, good enough cooling and real-world benchmarks for the specific games you play most often. Anyone buying a machine for long-term eSports play should also look at how the manufacturer tunes power, thermal limits and fan profiles, since these are the factors that can make real-world performance differ widely from a spec sheet. A good BIOS release sometimes makes a clearer difference than a CPU upgrade on paper alone. Intel's statement doesn't mean every earlier criticism of hybrid CPUs was wrong, but it is a clear reminder that gaming performance in 2026 depends on hardware and software together.
