Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs finally get a gaming performance boost thanks to the latest Cyberpunk 2077 patch
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Intel has ended 2024 with a few hardware launches. Most recently, that would be the new Battlemage GPUs, which have seemed to go down a treat (so far) – but before that, we got the Intel Core Ultra 200S series, otherwise known as Arrow Lake. In terms of gaming performance, they were a little bit of a letdown, failing to offer a substantial upgrade over the 14th-generation processors.
In our Core Ultra 9 285K review, Intel’s flagship CPU did prove its worth with exceptional multi-core performance and great temperatures, but its gaming performance failed to impress versus the competition; even the 14900K was ahead in some scenarios. However, a new patch for Cyberpunk 2077 boasts an up to 33% performance boost, and new benchmarks back it up.
Intel Arrow Lake CPUs get up to 33% performance boost in Cyberpunk 2077
Update 2.2 for Cyberpunk 2077 went live on December 10th and brought a long list of changes. You can read the full patch notes here. Once you scroll past all the new character customization and photo mode upgrades, all the way down to ‘PC-Specific’ changes, you’ll find the following patch note:
- Optimized threading system to improve performance by up to 33% on Intel Arrow Lake based CPUs.
Intel’s CPU sector hasn’t been able to celebrate too many successes lately. The 285K was quickly outdone by the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with Team Red launching the new best CPU for gaming shortly after Arrow Lake arrived. The 9800X3D got all the fanfare and sold out almost immediately. But now, Team Blue finally has something to cheer about.
Deciding to ditch Hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), on the Core Ultra 200S series was an interesting move from Intel. This aided efficiently, but our 285K tests in Cyberpunk 2077 paired with the RTX 4070 Ti at 1080p low settings show the 285K performing about the same as the 14900K, and 47% worse than the Ryzen 9 9950X on average. Keep in mind that this was before the new 2.2 update arrived.
In-house benchmarks (prior to update 2.2)
Performance uplift after update 2.2
And now, new benchmarks published by CapFrameX show an overclocked 285K CPU offering “up to 30% better lows” using the new optimized threading system – a much-welcomed improvement to overall game stability. These benchmarks are shown with the RX 7900 XTX using “demanding scene + settings” for testing in comparison to our 1080p low scores above.
- Cores: 24
- Threads: 24
- Boost clock speed: 5.7GHz
- Base clock speed: 3.7GHz P-cores/3.2GHz E-cores
- L3 Cache: 36MB
- TDP: 125W base/250W max
- Platform: LGA 1851 (Arrow Lake)
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