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[Jayden Cox]

Here’s the deal from actual bench testing: modern CPUs with invariant TSC will absolutely destroy HPET for gaming, and it’s not even close. The TSC is a per-core 64-bit register that ticks at a constant rate (Intel calls this “Invariant TSC,” AMD does the same on Zen), and reading it is a single RDTSC instruction that costs basically nothing—just a few cycles of latency. HPET, on the other hand, lives on the chipset and requires memory-mapped I/O reads at a much lower frequency (usually 8–25 MHz vs. your CPU’s multi-GHz clock). That low resolution plus the MMIO round-trip creates measurable scheduling jitter. On the competitive titles I benchmark (VALORANT, CS2, Apex), flipping HPET off and letting the OS use the invariant TSC consistently shaved 3–8 ms off 1% lows and tightened frame

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