Intel announced that it has largely resolved four major problems that caused poor gaming performance in its new Arrow Lake processors.
Core Ultra 200S series released in October Arrow Lake CPU‘s claimed to provide high performance with low power consumption. However, initial reviews showed that gaming performance in particular fell below expectations. Intel’s Vice President of Client AI and Technical Marketing, Robert Hallock, explained in an interview with HotHardware that they have identified the roots of the problems and have been gradually releasing patches over the last two weeks.
Causes of Poor Performance on Arrow Lake CPUs
It turned out that the problems were caused by the timing of an update that was planned to optimize Windows’ processor power management (PPM) system. While this update was supposed to be released before reviewers tested the processors, it was planned to be released once the processors became widely available.
Due to the missing PPM update, Intel’s performance-boosting Application Performance Optimization (APO) software was not effective in games. Additionally, misconfigured performance settings also had a negative impact.
Intel released fixes for these issues in Windows 11 build 26100.2161. It was also stated that Epic Games has resolved the driver compatibility issue that caused the blue screen error in games such as Star Wars Outlaws using Easy Anti-Cheat.
Intel plans to release another set of performance improvements for Arrow Lake CPUs in January and offer a comprehensive update at the CES show. For now, it recommends users to update Windows and motherboard BIOS. The final performance improvements will be provided with the “final” update that will be available next year.