Intel Investigating Core Ultra 200S Shortcomings, Says Gaming Performance Fell Short of Expectations & Will Be Fixed

Intel is investigating the possibility of its latest Core Ultra 200S CPUs performing better than what independent reviews showed in gaming.

Intel says that there are multiple issues at the OS and BIOS level that have led to inferior gaming performance of desktop Arrow Lake chips, but the fix is on the way

We all saw Intel’s Arrow Lake, aka Core Ultra 200S CPU’s performance results in gaming and productivity. Unlike what we previously expected, the processors brought a regression in gaming performance. Even though it wasn’t the case with CPU-oriented workloads, according to Intel, the gaming performance of these processors should have been better as well.

As per the latest interview of Hot Hardware with Robert Hallock, VP and General Manager at Intel, the initial benchmarks of Core Ultra 200S didn’t go as planned. Hallock said that the performance regression was due to multifactor issues at both BIOS and OS levels. While he didn’t want to go deeper into the details, it seemed like he was indicating that there are optimization issues with Core Ultra 200S CPUs.

I 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.

• Robert Hallock (VP & GM at Intel) via HotHardware

What exactly are the issues at the…