Intel's Robert Hallock has acknowledged that the Core Ultra 200S series (Arrow Lake) launch has been hampered by optimization issues, leading to disappointing gaming performance compared to the previous-gen Raptor Lake chips. He confirmed this during a live stream with HotHardware.
Hallock revealed that specific BIOS and OS-level setting combinations caused performance problems, and unusually high memory latency (up to 180ns) was observed in some cases. However, he clarified that the lower gaming performance wasn't directly related to memory latency or the new tile-based architecture, but rather tuning and optimization issues. Intel's internal testing showed significantly better results than third-party reviews.
Intel is actively working on fixes and aims to release at least a couple by the end of November or early December. A full audit is also underway to determine the root causes of the performance discrepancies and outline corrective actions.
This acknowledgment comes after the Core Ultra 200S series faced criticism for its gaming performance, especially compared to AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, for instance, performed worse than the Core i9-14900K in several gaming benchmarks.
