Intel says it will 'fix' Arrow Lake and Intel Core Ultra 200S CPU gaming performance

Robert Hallock, Intel's VP and GM of client AI and technical marketing, discussed the recent Arrow Lake or Intel Core Ultra 200S Series launch in an interview with HotHardware on YouTube. One topic brought up was the gaming performance of the new flagship Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, which, per our review, performed poorly - especially when stacked against the previous 14th-generation Intel CPUs.

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The new Core Ultra 200 desktop processors performed below Intel's expectations, surprising the company. "The launch just didn't go as planned," Robert Hallock said. I will say that the performance we saw in reviews is not what we expected and not what we intended."

It's reminiscent of AMD's recent Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 Series launch, where performance fell below internal expectations, leading to BIOS updates and even Windows updates that aimed to boost performance in specific workloads. This time, it's Intel's turn, as the company plans to roll out updates that will "fix" or improve performance by the end of November or early December.

• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Processor Review - Gamers Will Want More
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Processor Review - Team Blue Has Seen Better Days
• Read more: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Processor Review - All of the gaming goodness without compromise

"I can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level," Robert Hallock confirms. Adding that the Arrow Lake launch "has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it."

Intel will also release a "comprehensive update" on the issues that caused the CPUs to underperform, and the fix will arrive in the form of a BIOS update or a Windows update. It will be interesting to see what changes the update makes to the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K's gaming performance; however, it is unlikely that it will get it close to AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, which is now seen by many as the best CPU for PC gaming.