- Intel has issued a full and detailed report on Arrow Lake’s poor performance
- Five different issues were highlighted, four of which are now resolved.
- You’ll need to update your BIOS and Windows 11 to get those fixes
Intel has completed its in-depth investigation into the issues with its Core Ultra 200S processors and has presented the full results, with most of the issues already fixed and one remaining fix to be taken in January 2025.
As you may recall, these Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, released in October, disappointed with their initial performance, particularly for PC gaming, and Intel later admitted that the Core Ultra 200S CPUs were not performing as well as expected, but that fixes were in place. in the future. pipeline.
In fact, we were promised cures for a “series of multifactorial problems,” and now we have all the information about those goblins in the silicon factories.
In a lengthy blog post, called a ‘field update’ (part one of two), Intel noted that: “Editorial conclusions on gaming performance were more polarized, with notable statistical variations from article to article. “These results were inconsistent with our internal testing.”
Team Blue then says “we have determined that there are five distinct issues that could alter performance or functionality,” before listing those areas. They are the following:
- Missing performance and power management (PPM) package
- Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO) could not take effect
- BSOD when trying to launch games using the Easy Anti-Cheat service
- Select misconfigured performance settings in the patcher or early enable BIOSes
- New BIOS performance optimizations
All of these issues have been “root caused,” meaning Intel has gotten to the bottom of why they are happening, and the first four have been resolved via updates that are now available.
To take advantage of these solutions, you must take advantage of two main updates. First, update Windows 11 to version 26100.2314 (or later), which is the November cumulative update for version 24H2. (We assume that the 23H2 update from the same month will also work, but the Blue Team doesn’t mention this, so it’s unclear.) This will address issues number one and two listed above.
Secondly, you need to get the latest BIOS update for your motherboard, which fixes problem number four. As for issue three, it is resolved by an update to the Easy Anti-Cheat driver (which will ship with the game that uses this anti-cheat system, which has been problematic with Arrow Lake on Windows 11 24H2).
The last issue, number five, will be fixed in January 2025 with a new BIOS update, which will provide a further performance boost.
Analysis: Initial double-digit rise, then single-digit follow-up
As Intel points out, you might want to wait until next month anyway, then update the BIOS and get the fixes for issues four and five in one go.
While the exact boost in gaming (and app) performance you get will depend on the exact mix of components in your PC and system configuration, as always, it appears that the first BIOS update (for the problem four) will give you at least a few percent increase, or perhaps a double-digit increase (up to 14% in theory, a pretty wide range). The second patch (for issue five, arriving in January) is likely to provide a “modest performance improvement in the single-digit range,” we’re told.
So both BIOS updates are likely to provide a similar improvement of around 5% or so, maybe a little more, but if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) you’ll get an even bigger improvement (because their system was more paralyzed by these problems in the first place).
We should also note that fix number two is for Intel APO (Application Performance Optimization) technology, so only a small number of games will benefit from it (those that support APO).
Intel has been commendably transparent in this process and in revealing the detailed results of its investigation, as the company promised it would do. So, that’s a definite tick for the Blue Team and hopefully any slowness in Arrow Lake games will be fixed by the time we get to the end of January 2025.
Via VideoCardz
