Intel Arrow Lake has struggled to compete against some of the best processors from both AMD and Intel itself, but improvements are on the way. In fact, a completely unexpected update just gave the CPUs a major boost. Unfortunately, there’s a caveat: That boost only applies to one game.
The update in question was just announced by CDProjektRed, which has dropped a surprise patch for Cyberpunk 2077. The game studio now promises to improve in-game performance on Arrow Lake CPUs by up to 33%, which is a tune-up that gamers badly need, considering that the CPUs generally failed to impress in gaming scenarios.
A 33% improvement is huge. According to CDProjektRed, the boost stems from optimizations made to the threading system, and Wccftech elaborates that this is related to the game’s ability to prioritize Intel’s P-cores in order to improve performance. This makes me wonder whether we might see an improvement on older Intel CPUs that also run P-cores, but that remains to be seen once reviewers benchmark the CPU with the new update.
Let’s put these numbers into perspective. In our benchmark of the Core Ultra 9 285K, we found the CPU just behind the Core i9-14900K, scoring 200 frames per second (fps) in Cyberpunk 2077. Admittedly, this was one of the better results for the chip, which ended up on par with the Ryzen 9 7950X in some titles, but it was still a whopping 18 fps behind the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in Cyberpunk 2077.
Assuming that the 33% performance boost translates to an fps increase, we’d now be looking at a much higher score for the Core Ultra 9 285K. This would bring the 200 fps result up to 266 fps, which would then put it 22% ahead of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. It’d even beat the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which averaged 232 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 in our testing.
It’s too early to take these numbers at face value, though. We’ll have to see how the new update really affects performance on Arrow Lake CPUs to judge whether the gains are truly as big as they could be. Intel is also said to be working on microcode updates for Arrow Lake that should arrive this month, so these results might change even more.
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