Intel’s Hybrid CPUs are still causing issues with legacy games

Creative Assembly are working to make Older Total War games compatible with Intel’s latest processors 

It has come to light that gamers playing Total War: Napoleon and other legacy Total War games with Intel’s latest CPUs are running into issues, problems which have been caused by the hybrid nature of Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake and 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors. 

Creative Assembly have confirmed that they are now working on new game patches that will eliminate these issues, making their legacy games compatible with Intel’s newest processors. 

When Intel launched their first mass market hybrid CPUs with their 12th generation Alder Lake platform, Intel delivered to the PC market CPUs with multiple different types of CPU core. With Alder Lake, Intel offered users performance-focused P-Cores and efficiency-focused E-Cores, both of which have differing characteristics. 

At launch, there were many games that performed poorly or simply did not run at all when used with Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake processors. Thankfully, game developers were able to quickly patch their games to eliminate these issues, knowing that future Intel CPUs will utilise hybrid x86 designs. 

Below is what Creative Assembly had to say about the issues that Intel 12th Gen CPUs have with Total War: Napoleon and “some other legacy games”.

    Hi everyone,

We’re aware that people are experiences issues with @Total War: NAPOLEON and some other legacy titles not working with Intel’s newest 12th gen CPUs. We’re currently investigating this with a view to roll out patches to address these issues in the coming months.

For a bit of insight into why these issues have arisen, the new Intel CPUs now have two types of cores; Performance and Efficiency. Previously, the core being used was irrelevant, but now we need to prioritize the performance ones. This is causing the issues we’re seeing. More light reading on the matter can be found in this handy post on the Intel site:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/12th-gen-intel-core-processor-gamedev-guide.html

Thanks for your patience while we resolve this!

– The Total War Team

In time, Total War: Napoleon will be patch to fully support Intel’s hybrid processors. Let’s hope that these patches can arrive soon, so that legacy Total War fans can continue to enjoy their games. 

You can join the discussion on Total War: Napoleon running poorly on Intel’s 12th Generation CPUs on the OC3D Forums.