Saturday, November 9th 2024
Intel Working on Fixing "Arrow Lake" Gaming Performance with Upcoming Patches
In an exclusive interview with Hot Hardware, Intel acknowledged that its recently launched Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, codenamed "Arrow Lake," have significant performance issues. However, Intel announced that a set of fixes are being developed. As our review confirmed, the launch of these new processors fell short of both consumer expectations and Intel's own projections, particularly in gaming performance, despite showing promise in productivity, content creation, and some AI workloads. In a discussion during a recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock, VP and general manager of client AI and technical marketing, addressed these concerns head-on, describing the Arrow Lake launch as "disastrous" and attributing the underwhelming performance to inadequately optimized systems.
Additionally, Hallock indicated that users can expect these updates to begin rolling out by the end of the month or shortly after that. The tech community awaits independent verification of these performance improvements, which could restore confidence in Intel's Arrow Lake platform and potentially reshape the current CPU performance hierarchy. Given that the promise is a "significant" performance uplift, we expect to see some interesting numbers as Intel's cores are performant from the microarchitectural standpoint. The mix of Windows and BIOS updates will be interesting to measure in the coming weeks. Here is the link to the video interview of the Hot Hardware crew and Robert Hallock.
Source:
Hot Hardware
Robert HallockI can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level, and I will say that the performance we saw in reviews is not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn't go as planned. That has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.
91 Comments on Intel Working on Fixing "Arrow Lake" Gaming Performance with Upcoming Patches
Hope he enjoys his paycheck. By the way, is that paycheck secured?
Other than that I consider it a great product. It offers (already) the same gaming performance as the 9950x, at much lower power draw.
As an early 13900k adopter I know this much.
Given the price of their CPU, I really don't understand someone who wouldn't pick a 7800X3D or a 9800X3D for a gaming rig
One more thing to add on list of shame is Intel’s mismanagement and lack of vision, I say that because they recently announced another revision of upcoming x86s which is a good thing but who knows when will it see the light, now they must move on and through away legacy which keeps them on edge.
Let's stop pretending anything caught Intel by surprise, they have tested and validated qualification samples for months prior to release, they knew exactly the performance characteristics of the hardware on different OS'.
An updated BIOS shouldn't matter for application performance, not unless it somehow incorrectly detects or configures hardware (yes, I'm talking about the actual UEFI BIOS here, not the GUI. I find it doubtful that the EFI kernel is somehow bloated vs. Raptor Lake, not unless they've added some speedup-loops :P)
Tweaks to Windows' scheduler might help some workloads, and lessen the performance disadvantage compared to Linux, but is not going to fundamentally change the performance characteristics of hardware, especially for gaming.
So the only thing left would be to tweak the CPU firmware, but tightening timings here would require massive validation and might even have unintended consequences.
Software will never make up for hardware design, this only sounds like a nonsensical response to the massively largely (and undeservedly) negative response to Arrow Lake; e.g. "our new patch gains up to xx% performance", when in reality there is no significant difference.
Its application performance is great, and gaming performance on par with Raptor Lake. (And I'm of course ignoring tests at 720p/1080p with RTX 4090, as testing unrealistic workloads are pointless.)
Let's be honest about what it really is; a small step forward. If it's not big enough of an upgrade, skip it and wait for the next one. No amount of software gimmicks is going to change that.
OTOH, removing legacy support IS one thing that will kill off X86, without legacy x86 has little future.He's in marketing, one step removed from absolute scum like used car salesman. No respect is deserved for anyone in that particular profession.No.
But they should not be expecting enthusiasts to be trying to run games on Ecores instead of just every single game thread being on a Pcore. Eight threads is not enough for modern games ported from CPU's with potentially 16 threads, which means games will inevitably drop back to Ecores and suddenly you'll have screwy 1% lows.
Which is exactly what is happening. You see it on their chips and you see it on the Steam Deck with its 8 threads with four off hyperthreading. That's why inevitably Valve will swap to a 6 core/12 thread or 8 core/16 thread CPU for the next one. They'll see the writing on the wall. Why didn't Intel?
Whoever at Intel thought a high performance enthusiast chip could run off only 8 pcore threads should have been fired yesterday.
Something is going on with microsoft/intel and the thread scheduling.
And while they may not be a big deal for single player games at higher resolutions, those performance deltas absolutely can matter for online play, particularly MMOs.