Intel announces Arrow Lake fix coming within a month – Robert Hallock confirms poor gaming performance is due to optimization issues

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Intel’s Robert Hallock has confirmed that the launch of Intel’s Core Ultra 200S series did not go as planned. In a live stream with HotHardware on YouTubeHallock revealed that optimization issues with the Arrow Lake platform were the main cause of degradation in gaming (relative to Intel’s previous-generation Raptor Lake chips).

Intel has identified a number of issues that caused Arrow Lake to exhibit bizarre performance characteristics on some workloads. Hallock revealed that certain combinations of BIOS and OS level settings caused issues that hindered performance.

In response to a question from Tom’s Hardware editor-in-chief Paul Alcorn, Hallock said Intel hopes to have at least a few fixes for Arrow Lake by the end of November – or early December at the latest.

In one case, a reviewer recorded a memory latency as high as 180 ns, more than twice worse than Arrow Lake’s expected memory latency of 70 – 80 ns.

Despite this memory latency issue, Hallock confirmed that to HotHardware The decline of Arrow Lake’s gaming performance compared to Raptor Lake had nothing to do with memory latency, nor was it caused by Intel’s decision to move to a tile-based architecture. Instead, Arrow Lake’s disappointing gaming performance was caused by tuning and optimization issues.

According to Hallock, Arrow Lake performance from third-party reviewers did not match what Intel saw in its internal testing. Hallock noticed a huge gap between third-party assessment performance and Intel’s internal testing.

Intel is reportedly working on a major internal response to resolve these issues. Hallock did not detail the exact issues plaguing Arrow Lake’s performance scores, but he did say that Intel will undergo a full audit that will explain exactly what went wrong with Arrow Lake’s launch and outline what the company is going to do. do to fix it.

That Intel recognizes Arrow Lake’s poor launch and massive optimization issues is… encouraging. The Core Ultra 200S series was perhaps one of Intel’s worst launches in recent memory, with gaming performance being the chip’s Achilles heel.

In our Core Ultra 9 285K reviewthe flagship Arrow Lake chip performed worse than the Core i9-14900K in our 14-game 1080p Geomean – even at super-fast use 8200 MHz DDR5 CUDIMMs. The debut of Arrow Lake was even more embarrassing compared to the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3Dwhich performed up to 60% faster in games than the Core Ultra 9 285K.