The Chinese tech press is abuzz with slides allegedly from Intel's pre-launch press-deck for the Core Ultra 2-series "Arrow Lake-S." The most sensational of these are Intel's first-party performance claims for the top Core Ultra 9 285K model. There's good news and bad news. Good news first—Intel claims to have made a big leap in energy efficiency with "Arrow Lake," and the 285K should offer gaming performance comparable to the current Core i9-14900K at around 80 W lower power draw for the processor. But then there in lies the bad news—despite claimed IPC gains for the "Lion Cove" P-core, and rumored clock speeds being on par with the "Raptor Cove" P-cores on the i9-14900K, the 285K is barely any faster than its predecessor in absolute terms.

In its first party testing, when averaged across 12 game tests, which we used Google optical translation to make out the titles of, Intel used performance numbers of the i9-14900K as the mean. The 285K beats the i9-14900K in only four games—Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Age of Mythology Retold, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and F1 23. It's on-par with the i9-14900K in Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Pharaoh, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Rainbow Six Siege. It's slower than the i9-14900K in Far Cry 6, FF XIV, F1 24, Red Dead Redemption 2. Averaged across this bench, the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up roughly on par with the Core i9-14900K in gaming. Intel also compared the 285K to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, and interestingly, even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

More than 500 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and each week new games integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. Last week, the stunningly-rendered, critically-acclaimed Senua's Saga: Hellblade II launched with day-one support for DLSS 3 and Reflex, followed by the release of Serum with DLSS 3, DLAA and Reflex, and Ships At Sea and Wuthering Waves with DLSS 2. This week, DLSS momentum continues with the launch of DLSS 3 in EA SPORTS F1 24, and DLSS 2 in Capes.

EA SPORTS F1 24 Arrives On The Grid May 31st, Featuring DLSS 3, DLAA, Reflex & Ray Tracing
Race as one of the 20 real-life drivers in EA SPORTS F1 24, the official video game of the 2024 FIA Formula One World Championship. Unleash your champion in pursuit of a legacy-defining F1 Career, the mode's first major update since 2016. Drive like the greatest and feel at one with the car through the all-new EA SPORTS Dynamic Handling System, and experience the best F1 racing to date thanks to all of the game's new additions and enhancements.