Intel Gives An Extensive Rundown On “Core Ultra 200S” Performance Status; Reveals 4/5 Root Causes Are Now Patched

Intel has decided to mark an end to the “disappointing” Arrow Lake-S gaming performance, identifying five different root causes, with most of the now sorted out.

Intel’s Arrow Lake-S Lineup Is Expected To Witness Noticeable Performance Improvements With The New Patches

We all know how it went when the Core Ultra 200S was launched. Many expected it to outperform the Ryzen 9000 CPUs, but in some cases, it came out to be even slower than Intel’s own Raptor Lake CPUs. This is why the community has been calling on Intel to push out a viable solution, mainly in the form of one big BIOS patch.

In a new community post, Intel acknowledged the massive difference between their internal testing and performance results of online reviews and figured out the reasons behind such a large gap. Intel’s investigations concluded that there are five different areas that potentially resulted in the performance differences, and to our surprise, it has already fixed 4 out of the five root causes:

We recently concluded our investigation, and we have determined that there are five distinct topics that could alter performance or functionality:

1. A missing Performance & Power Management (PPM) package.
2. Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO) could not take effect.
3. BSODs when attempting to launch game titles utilizing the Easy Anti-Cheat service.
4. Select performance settings misconfigured on reviewer or early enabling BIOSes.
5. New BIOS performance optimizations.

We are pleased to report that 5 of 5 issues have been root caused, 4 of 5 issues are already solved with updates available to you, and significant performance upside is accessible by applying these updates.

Intel advises ARL-S consumers to apply the latest BIOS updates and run their Windows 11 on the newest “26100.2314” version to ensure that the above-mentioned root causes are patched out. Interestingly, Team Blue mentions that new BIOS files are set to be launched by January, close to CES 2025, where the firm will also give a rundown on what is going on behind the scenes through a “complete performance digest.” Intel has also provided a deep dive into the root problems mentioned in their community post here, which you can check out for further details.

Out of the 4/5 root causes fixed, the last one requires a new firmware image, which is currently in the validation stages before the official release. Hence, we can expect it to roll out soon as well. Yet again, Intel will provide a media update at CES 2025, which will also be the “Field Update 2”, probably ending all ARL-S performance issues. As a disclaimer, Intel says that the performance improvements after the new update are subjective depending upon host environments, but there will be a noticeable difference.

We are yet to test out what the new changes have brought regarding performance improvements, but it seems like Intel is confident that their solutions will work out. It looks like this is what Intel’s Robert Hallock was talking about when he mentioned an update “coming in a few days” in a post back on December 13.