Scid vs pc issues with 14900K CPU

Hi everyone,

I just upgraded my 11900K machine to 14900K, and as some of you know the architecture is totally different.  Now with the P-cores E-cores situation no matter what number of cores I set in the GUI it gets confused and not using the cores properly (seems to only stress the E-cores).

I tried 8, 24,32..   everytime after a couple of seconds it just stop using the P-cores and stress only the E-cores for some reason.     It gets confused I think.

I am using stockfish engine.    With the 11900k I just set it to 8 and it was using 100% of the CPU no problem, but now I am stuck.. I don't have a GUI to work with.    

Any of you with intel 12th,13th,14th gen intel that can help me?

Thanks for informing us. I am planning to buy a new PC. Intel's architecture may not be best for Stockfish.

I am not sure if this is the engine's fault, I think it more related to the GUI.

I have a hard time believing that stockfish can't work with the newer CPUs (12th, 13th, 14th gen)

Anybody here has experience with them? I really want to analyze my games. but I can't.

Try running whatever GUI program you are using to load stockfish, as administrator, which you can also toggle in the shortcut or program launch properties (basic windows stuff). Doing this allows stockfish to run on all P and E cores, even when I alt tab out. Also, are you using windows 10 or 11?

When I first got these big/little CPUs, I had the same problem--whenever I alt tabbed or opened something else, Stockfish would suddenly switch to E cores only and not use the P-cores, causing massive lag, until I put the board window in the foreground. Note this was on windows 11.

If youre getting only E core usage and are running stockfish without alt tabbing, even with it in the foreground, make sure you are using an up to date version of windows 11, and NOT windows 10.

Another thing:
disable the microsoft windows defender "real time protection" service, in virus protection, as on some motherboards and BIOS versions, using all 32 threads in stockfish with this active can cause the GUI to virtually freeze. This service can be disabled permanently in gpedit.msc in one of the options for windows defender (you may need to google exactly where it's at).

Make sure that Tools->AnalysisEngines, low CPU is not selected.

I'm not sure if tthis issue is totally OS / Scheduler related or not... most likely it is.

But ScidvsPC is not the best interface for Stockfish. Stockfish is an absolute CPU hog, and so are big intepreted GUIs. I see we only have two levels of process priority, but perhaps windows supports three. I dont have a system to mess around with any of this... and no special fondness for Stockfish.

-----------------------------------

// This gets or sets the priority class of a process.
int
sc_info_priority (ClientData cd, Tcl_Interp * ti, int argc, const char ** argv)
{
#ifdef _WIN32
const char * usage = "Usage: sc_info priority <pid> [normal|idle]";
if (argc < 3 || argc > 4) { return errorResult (ti, usage); }

int pid = strGetInteger(argv[2]);

if (argc == 4) {
// For saftey, only normal and idle classes can be set:
bool idlePriority = false;
switch (argv[3][0]) {
case 'i': idlePriority = true; break;
case 'n': idlePriority = false; break;
default: return errorResult (ti, usage);
}
// Try to obtain a process handle for setting the priority class:
HANDLE hProcess = OpenProcess (PROCESS_SET_INFORMATION, false, pid);
if (hProcess == NULL) {
return errorResult (ti, "Unable to set process priority.");
}
// Set the process class to NORMAL or IDLE:
SetPriorityClass (hProcess,idlePriority ? IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS : NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS);CloseHandle (hProcess);
}

--------------------------------------

Further down in tkscid.cpp, it mentions SetPriorityClass can also take HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS apparently

Hi Kylearan,

Thanks for the tips. I am running fully updated Windows 11 And "Scid vs pc" GUI is in the foreground. I can try running it as an administrator but I doubt it would help.

Hi stevenaaus,
I didn't thought about the low priority setting.. good call I will try it.

I am actually very comfortable with Scid vs pc, and this is coming from someone that used a paid Fritz GUI for years.

I think Scid is very light (Fritz is super heavy and laggy and freezes randomly).

Also when using it with 10900k/ 11900k it was using those CPUs perfectly (50% total CPU usage in HWinfo.. because not using hyperthreading, so it's actually 100%).

By the way.. how many cores should I set in the GUI for the 14900K? 24 for the real physical cores ?

thank you very much for the insights.

Yes! I can confirm that disabling "Low CPU priority" did fix this.

I set number of threads to 24 and now its using all the real cores (77%).

Thank you again for the help. Now I can analyze my games.

Hi, I'm using the ChessBase GUIs (PowerFritz 18 and ChessBase 16) on a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1355U, where I have installed Stockfish 16.1. I have no issues whatsoever with this GUI, the engine, and the selection of the desired number of CPUs (cores) to use.

Cheers for the feedback

Hmmm - the 14900K CPU is quite possibly buggy Whether because of aggresive bios defaults, or otherwise.

Scattered reports from Core i9-13900K and i9-14900K users over the last couple of months have pointed to processor power usage as a possible source of crashes even in relatively undemanding games like...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/intel-is-investigating-game-crashes-on-top-end-core-i9-desktop-cpus/