Hello guys, just wanted to talk about the performance of star citizen on high end PCs with a 12th gen Intel CPU. (Scroll down for TL;DR workaround - no BIOS settings - its easy!) After I upgraded my CPU from 10900K to 12900K months ago I've noticed that star citizen became unplayble for me (Video "12900k StarCitizen default"). I had permanent stutters and lags and that on a machine with following specs: CPU: Intel i9-12900K RAM: Trident Z5 2x 16GB DDR5-6000 36CL Kit Mainboard: Gigabyte Z690 Xtreme GPU: Gigabyte Xtreme 3090 RTX Main Display: Asus ROG 2560x1440@165Hz Windows 11: Version 10.0.22000 Build 22000 GPU driver: 512.59 BIOS settings are all default beside: Internal GPU disabled, XMP Profile 1 enabled I've tried reinstalling windows 10/11, changing GPU drivers to older ones, changing graphic settings in Nvidia CP, overclocking (lol), disabling features in BIOS, updating BIOS of MB and GPU and much more... Nothing helped and I always ended up having permanent stutters in Star Citzen. Talking about Star Citizen - it's literally the only game on my PC that is having issues with the new CPU so I continued my research and found actually a workaround that maybe also will help the devs to make a fix. Later, I started playing around with processor affinity in task manager and found out interessting things. This is how my game runs if I leave everything default and just launch the game. (just think for a moment, this is how a newbie will see the game!) The FPS counter shows you 60-100 fps but you will notice that the game in fact isn't running smooth at all. Lags and stutters happen permanently - and it does not matter where you in the game are or what you do. Flying like this is not fun. These all tests were done in the middle of nowhere between crusader and arccorp in my sentinel. Since I'm aware of the new E- and P-core architecture of the 12th gen Intel CPUs - I tried disabling the E-cores. In the screenshot below you will see my settings (Selected threads 0-15, which belong to the 8 physical P-cores). The results weren't what l expected - it made the game run even worse. Stutters and lag became diashow. E-cores weren't in use but something else was causing the issues. NOTE: I tried disabling E-cores in BIOS and that actually helped BUT I paid for the whole CPU - I'm gonna use the whole CPU. I'm not willing to change this everytime I run a different game. It was almost the same result as next one but 10-20 fps less on the "wall test" like in the videos. So, since it didn't help - my next guess was hyperthreading. I used a trick that I know from older games and used only the first threads of the P-cores (0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14). Aaaaand violá! The game runs smooth, utilizing 100% of all selected threads and I had no stutters at all. The game is playable and I can leave all my E-/P-Cores + hyperthreading enabled. TL;DR Workaround 1. Open RSI Launcher 2. Open task manager and select the tab "Details" 3. Locate the 3 processes called "RSI Launcher.exe" repeat these steps for every of them: 3.1 Right click on the process and open "set affinity" 3.2 In this window deselect "all processors" 3.3 Select only the first thread of your P-cores (12900K f.e. It's 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14) and click OK. 4. Launch the game and enjoy Possible workarounds from this thread Disable E-Cores in BIOS Disable Hyperthreading in BIOS Disable C-States in BIOS Different CPU affinity Switch to Windows 11 I hope this thread will help new players who are struggling with their brand new PC to enjoy Star Citizen. Also hoping for a fix, so we don't have to deal with this every time we launch the game. Please contribute to this issue if you have same troubles: https://issue-council.robertsspaceindustries.com/projects/STAR-CITIZEN/issues/STARC-32843 Cheers Corn