If you regularly read our hardware news and reviews, you know that the much-praised Intel Core Ultra 200S series of processors not only failed to impress at launch, but was clearly left behind in the competition. In novel blog post todaywhich we previously had access to, Intel says that while this first statement is undoubtedly true, it has been busy identifying what went wrong and has noted four key issues and released fixes.
It was known that Arrow Lake’s gaming performance was lower than the previous generation Raptor Lake even before testing began, as Intel openly stated that this would be the case when it released its novel processor architecture in October. The main goal of multi-board processors was lower power consumption in games while offering generational performance gains in multi-threaded workloads.
The latter was certainly achieved, but when we all got our hands on the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K (Core i9 14900K and Core i5 14600K replacements), it became clear that Intel was experiencing very different gaming performance than reviewers. However, after some time and after talking to Intel about my results, the truth came out: Arrow Lake there wasn’t as good as expected, but clearly something was wrong.
In the update, Intel notes that its engineers have identified four specific issues that were causing grave gaming performance issues.
No performance and power management (PPM) suite.
Modern processors can operate in various performance states, but they require energetic support from the operating system to function properly. This is done via the PPM package – think of it as a driver that controls the clock speed and other timings depending on the power settings used by the operating system.
Intel did not schedule the Arrow Lake PPM to appear on Windows Update in time for reviews and retail availability of the Core Ultra 200S chips. Results? In Intel’s words: “Unusual CPU scheduling behavior; Artificial performance increase when cores are disabled or affinityed; large differences between benchmark runs; reduced single thread performance; occasional spikes in DRAM latency; unexpected performance differences between Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2.”
All of these issues resulting from the “simple” power profile show how convoluted today’s processors are, but the fact that Intel didn’t schedule the profile to appear in a pre-launch Windows update is a bit irritating to read.
At least this should all be a thing of the past now, because Windows 11 update KB5044384 apparently includes a profile, and Intel claims it can itself remedy up to 30% performance loss over expectations.
The Intel Application Performance Optimizer cannot be used
Intel processors utilize a hybrid architecture (that is, full-performance, high-power P-cores and lower-performance, lower-power E-cores) across four generations of processors, including Arrow Lake, and all require a customized thread scheduler to ensure that the appropriate cores support game threads to ensure the best performance.
Application performance optimizer (APO) is a tool that manages this process for specific games, and Intel used it to collect performance data before launch. However, the missing PPM meant that APO would simply do nothing, leaving up to 14% of game speed off the table.
With the PPM now available in update KB5044384 it should work, but it’s worth noting that few reviewers, including myself, ever used APO when first testing an Intel processor. Oddly enough, when I tried APO at 285Kit worked, so I can only assume I already had a Windows update at that point.
However, for real games, it makes sense to install APO and optimize thread scheduling in supported games. After all, you get a free performance boost.
BSOD when running games using Easy Anti-Cheat
I didn’t experience this issue when testing the Core Ultra 9 285K and Ultra 5 245K processors, but that’s simply because no games in our CPU benchmark suite utilize Epic processors Easy fraud protection Work. However, it turns out that there is a conflict between Windows 11 24H2 and older versions of EAC, which Epic has already addressed and is pushing the update to developers.
This is good news for Fortnite fans, for example, but it doesn’t seem to be something specific to Arrow Lake, just Windows. It may happen that yes Is but only with the 24H2 update, but for anyone using 23H2, the EAC patch will not change the actual performance of any game.
Performance settings misconfigured in reviewer/early BIOSes
Testing Arrow Lake was filled with frustration as motherboard vendors released novel BIOS updates throughout the run-up to the review. I’ve noticed a lot of differences between how motherboards are configured to support Core Ultra 200S chips – for example, the ring bus clock is supposed to be constant, but one manufacturer set it to go down, as required for Raptor Lake.
Intel says it noticed that so-called “very important settings” such as resizable BAR, Intel APO, compute tile ring clock, memory controller ratio (aka gear), and persistent and transient power limits were being applied inconsistently.
This is no miniature list, and together they explain problems such as extremely high memory latency (up to twice expected values), buggy ring clocks, gigantic run-to-run bias for active or unpredictable workloads, and no performance gain with BAR or APO.
Apparently this issue has also been resolved and “the current BIOS releases for Intel Z890 motherboards have harmonized these settings.” However, I am currently using an MSI MEG Z780 Hero motherboard with the latest BIOS, but it still allows me to change the ring clock. I can’t tell at this point if it’s an Intel or MSI problem because I only have MSI boards on hand.
More coming soon
Intel concludes its blog by saying that it has identified further improvements to the BIOS, which is currently under review, and plans to release the firmware with all updates and microcode 0x114 in behind schedule January. It plans to present all of these findings in detail at CES 2025.
Once all this is done, I’ll test the Core Ultra 9 285K’s gaming performance again to see how much better it is after all this work. Whether it’s enough for me to recommend the Arrow Lake chip over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D for gaming or the Ryzen 9 9950X for content creation is another matter entirely.
I’m really glad Intel has been working on fixing the Arrow Lake issues, but time will tell if it’s too little or too behind schedule.
