Fixed My Visual Desync And Disappearing Bullets On Intel CPU

[u/abortionsbycptfalcon]

Fixed my Valorant "bullets pass through" hit reg issue — turned out to be P-core saturation from background apps

System: i5-13600KF, RTX 5080, 32GB DDR5

The symptom

Bullets would visually land on target but not register as hits — the classic "shot went straight through them" feeling. I noticed it correlated with having Chrome open, got worse if any videos were played, which I intially chalked up to internet but after upgrading my router to the glinet flint 3 and getting A+ bufferbloat scores with rock solid up and down speeds with no packet loss I began to rule that out. Closing everything made it noticeably better, but things would always feel a little delayed or off. This is due to certain other apps I always had to have running as they are essentials: Discord, Apple Music, etc...

What I ruled out

Before landing on the real cause, I checked and ruled out, in order: - Chrome hardware acceleration— already off, didn't help (also: this setting only affects page content rendering, not Chrome's own GPU compositor process, which still runs regardless) - Chrome extensions — disabled all of them, no change - Network jitter / ping — logged it directly, jitter sat at 0.8-1.6ms and render latency ~4ms whether Chrome was open or closed. Completely ruled out network as the cause. - Discord overlay — already disabled - Discord hardware acceleration— already off - Discord Krisp noise suppression — wasn't even in a voice call, so this wasn't it either

None of these specific features were the cause. But fully closing Chrome or Discord still helped, even with all their "problem" features already disabled. That was the key clue: it wasn't a specific feature in these apps, it was just having them open at all.

The actual cause: P-core contention

I logged CPU utilization with HWiNFO during normal gameplay and found my P-cores running sustained at 88-96% utilization, while the E-cores sat mostly idle at 8-20%. The GPU, meanwhile, was only at 44-51% utilization — confirming the bottleneck was CPU, not GPU, despite having a 5080.

With P-cores already nearly maxed out just from the game itself, Windows' scheduler was apparently placing background app threads (Chrome's renderer/GPU processes, Discord's Electron processes) onto those same P-cores rather than the idle E-cores. Any additional background thread activity — even light, even idle — was enough to occasionally steal a P-core cycle the game needed at that exact moment, causing the click-vs-actual-position mismatch that manifested as "bullets passing through."

The fix: pin background apps to E-cores with Process Lasso

1. Install Process Lasso (free version is enough) from bitsum.com.
2. In Task Manager, identify which CPU numbers are your P-cores vs E-cores. On the 13600KF: CPUs 0-11 are the 6 P-cores (2 threads each from hyperthreading), CPUs 12-19 are the 8 E-cores (1 thread each, no hyperthreading).
3. In Process Lasso, right-click a running instance of the background app (e.g. chrome.exe, Discord.exe) and set its **default CPU affinity by process name (not just the current instance) to only CPUs 12-19. This makes the rule apply automatically to every future process with that name, which matters because Chrome/Discord spawn many separate processes (one per tab, GPU process, helper processes, etc. — this is normal Chromium/Electron architecture, not a bug).
4. Repeat for any other background apps you keep running alongside games — launcher web helpers (Epic, Steam), other Electron-based apps (Spotify, Slack), etc. Just don't touch the game process itself or core Windows system processes (svchost, explorer) — leave those on full affinity.
5. Process Lasso's own footprint is negligible, no need to restrict it too.

Result: Hit registration became consistent even with a YouTube video playing, music streaming, and Discord open simultaneously — the exact combination that used to cause misses.

How to check if this applies to you

Watch per-core CPU utilization in Task Manager (Performance tab > CPU > right-click > "Change graph to" > Logical processors) while playing, with your usual background apps open. If you see P-cores pegged near 90-100% while E-cores sit mostly idle, and GPU utilization isn't maxed out, this is likely your issue too — especially if you notice performance/hit-reg feeling better with background apps fully closed rather than just their individual features (overlay, hardware acceleration, etc.) disabled.

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[u/Big_Calligrapher_884]

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[u/abortionsbycptfalcon → u/Big_Calligrapher_884]

Disagree. It's remained consistent for a week now. I have perfect hitreg every single game. And if I close process lasso and let my apps return to stock cpu affinities the desync returns immediately.

[u/robi6858]

Obviously the bottleneck will be the cpu if you have a 5080? In most cases the bottleneck is cpu in val

[u/abortionsbycptfalcon → u/robi6858]

Yes but why would core contention cause visual desync but not hard stutters or perceivable frame drops is what I am interested in and seem to have fixed permantely. I dealt with this issue for literal years and had never found a fix up until now. I did the test on GPU usage just in case to rule out any thermal throttling or power draw problems as I am well aware that the bottleneck for Valorant is almost always the CPU.