#hardware

The Game That Needs Fewer Cores

I wanted to play Ghost Recon Wildlands on my gaming laptop, an ASUS G16 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H in it, which is a hybrid chip with performance cores, efficiency cores, and a couple of low power efficiency cores on top of that, 22 threads visible to Windows in total. The game hung on the launcher screen and would not move past it, there was no error, it was just stuck.

I was away from the laptop at the time, so Atlas did the first pass remotely over SSH. The Ubisoft Connect install turned out to have core files missing, the launcher log was full of the same error over and over, and the process was running with no window at all. A silent reinstall of Connect fixed that part. It was a real bug, it just was not the one that mattered, because the game still would not load once Connect worked again.

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