Intel explains performance fixes for Arrow Lake CPUs

Intel’s new Arrow Lake CPUs debuted in October and promised high performance with lower power consumption, but reviews, including ours, found surprisingly poor gaming performance. Tom Warren said of the Core Ultra 9 285K: “…in many titles it performs worse than the 14th generation chips it was intended to replace.”

“Ultimately, there were four fundamental problems that we needed to address, and solutions to those are actually already in place right now,” said Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of client AI and technical marketing, during an interview with HotHardware. “They have come out sporadically over the last two weeks as update schedules allow.”

An issue arose from a “bogus” update that was intended to optimize Windows’ processor power management (PPM) system for Intel’s Core Ultra 200S series processors. (PPM adjusts a CPU’s performance based on the current power plan, e.g. Balanced, High Performance, Power Saving, etc.).

Instead of releasing the PPM update before reviewers got their hands on the processors, Intel planned to release the update as soon as it was generally available, which may have resulted in reviewers finding worse performance than expected. Due to the lack of a PPM update, Intel’s performance-enhancing Application Performance Optimizer (APO) could not be used in games, and “misconfigured” performance settings had a negative impact on the testers’ benchmarks.

A fix for these issues has already been applied in Windows 11 Build 26100.2161. According to Intel, Epic Games also fixed a driver compatibility issue that resulted in a blue screen of death when running games with Easy Anti-Cheat, such as: Star Wars Outlaws.

Intel plans to release another set of performance improvements for Arrow Lake CPUs in January and 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.