Intel’s new Arrow Lake CPUs came out in October promising high performance at lower power levels, but reviews, including ours, noted surprisingly lackluster gaming performance. Tom Warren said of the Core Ultra 9 285K, “…in many titles, it provides worse performance than the 14th Gen chips it was designed to replace.”
“At the end of the day, there were four root issues that we needed to address, and fixes for those are actually already in the field right now,” Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of client AI and technical marketing said during an interview with HotHardware. “They’ve been coming out over the last two weeks or so in drips and drabs, as update schedules allow.”
One issue stemmed from a “mistimed” update that was supposed to optimize Windows’ processor power management (PPM) system for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S-series processors. (PPM adjusts the performance of a CPU based on the current power plan, such as Balanced, High Performance, Power Saver, etc).
Instead of releasing the PPM update before reviewers got their hands on the processors, Intel says it scheduled the update to go out when it became widely available, which may have caused reviewers to see worse-than-expected performance. Due to the missing PPM update, Intel’s performance-boosting Application Performance Optimizer (APO) also couldn’t take effect in games, while “misconfigured” performance settings also had a negative impact on reviewers’ benchmarks.
A fix was already applied for these issues in Windows 11 build 26100.2161. Intel also says Epic Games resolved a driver compatibility issue causing the blue screen of death when running games with Easy Anti-Cheat, such as Star Wars Outlaws.
Intel is planning to release another set of performance upgrades for Arrow Lake CPUs in January, and it will “provide a comprehensive performance update” at CES. For now, Intel recommends updating Windows and applying the latest BIOS update to your motherboard if you haven’t already. Otherwise, you can wait until the “final” performance update next year.