Intel's new Arrow Lake CPU, launched in October, promised higher performance with lower power consumption, but multiple reviews pointed out that the chip's gaming performance was unexpectedly lackluster. Tom Warren said of the Core Ultra 9285K: "...in many games, it doesn't perform as well as the 14th generation chip it replaces."

Now, the embattled chipmaker says it has gradually released updates that fix most of the issues it discovered.

Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of customer AI and technology marketing at Intel, told Hot Hardware: "At the end of the day, we need to solve four fundamental problems, and the fixes for those problems are actually in the field right now. They have been rolling out over the past two weeks or so as the update schedule allows."

One of the issues stems from a "mistimed" update that was supposed to optimize Windows' Processor Power Management (PPM) system for Intel Core 200S series processors. (PPM can adjust the performance of the CPU according to the current power plan such as balance, high performance, energy saving, etc.).

Intel said it did not release PPM updates before reviewers got their hands on the processors, but instead scheduled the updates to be released when the processors were widely available, which could result in reviewers seeing worse performance than expected. Due to the lack of PPM updates, Intel's performance-boosting Application Performance Optimizer (APO) also failed to take effect in the game, while "misconfigured" performance settings also negatively impacted reviewers' benchmarks.


Fixes for these issues have been applied in Windows 11 build 26100.2161. Intel also said that Epic Games fixed a driver compatibility issue that caused a blue screen of death when running games with Easy Anti-Cheat functionality, such as Star Wars Outlaws.

Intel plans to release another set of performance upgrades for Arrow Lake CPUs in January and will "provide a comprehensive performance update" at CES. Currently, Intel recommends updating Windows systems, applying the latest BIOS update to the motherboard if it is not already updated, or waiting until next year to download a "final" performance update.