Intel has detailed major updates in the quest to improve performance of its ill-fated Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake processors that were released back in October. The inconsistent performance at times saw them perform slower that older models with some very questionable results, especially in games. However, it has released a long list of fixes that could improve performance by up to 30%.
There are no fewer than eight problems identified as causes of poor performance in reviewers' test systems back in October and these have largely been addressed in recent weeks via Windows updates as well as game patches and motherboard BIOS updates.
In short, practically everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong in terms of launch performance with everything from increased memory latency, PCIe resizable BAR performance and its own Application Performance Optimizer (APO) all contributing to what Intel claims is a significant loss in performance as well consistency. That's certainly what reviewers saw at launch and some games such as Cyberpunk 2077 were catastrophically underperforming.
The fixes actually come in four parts. Firstly, Windows 11 update KB5044384, new BIOS updates currently available for Z890 motherboards, an updated anti-cheap driver provided by Epic Games to fix stability issues and finally, another round of motherboard BIOS updates set to land in January 2025.
Fixes provided in this update impact several issues reported by Intel. Firstly the processor power management (PPM) in Windows was not fully optimized for the new Core Ultra 200 processors due to Intel releasing this update to coincide with retail availability of the products, potentially leaving reviewers with generic PPM profiles in their systems.
According to Intel, missing, incomplete, or malfunctioning PPM can affect CPU frequency, core parking, C-State latency and memory latency that could contribute massively to not just lower than expected performance, but highly variable performance too. Intel estimates this affected performance anywhere from 6% to 30% and included single-threaded as well as multi-threaded performance.
In addition, Intel's Application Performance Optimizer, a software-level feature that amongst other things ensures demanding tasks such as games threads are sent to higher-performing cores on a CPU, may not have been working properly. This could mean that game threads were sent to lower power E-cores or otherwise not given priority and sent to higher-performing P-cores. This issue too has apparently been fixed in update KB5044384, which you can get via Windows Update and could add up to 14% more performance.
When reviewers test CPUs, they'll usually set the correct memory frequency and make sure the CPU performance profile is correctly configured, but other settings are usually left as they are. This is on the assumption that performance-boosting settings such as PCIe resizable BAR are configured properly as standard - in the case of resizable-BAR this has been set to enabled as standard for a number of years. CPU-specific options such as compute tile ring frequency and memory controller ratio or 'gear' are also usually configured for optimate default performance.
According to Intel, though, some of these settings may not have been set correctly in the BIOS, for example being disabled when they should have been enabled. It's reasonable here for any reviewer to assume that Resizable-BAR would be enabled out of the box as it usually is so it's possible some may have missed the fact it was disabled if in fact it was. The latest BIOS updates will make sure these settings are configured properly and you can get them by visiting the support page of your specific motherboard model.
Intel Core Ultra 200 processors will receive additional new BIOS versions in the first half of January that will add additional performance, citing single-digit performance benefits across 35 games. The BIOS versions to watch out for are those including microcode update 0x114 with the final update including Intel CSME Firmware Kit 19.0.0.1854v2 and Windows 11 26100.2314 or newer.