Intel 0x114 Microcode Update Spotted And It Could Fix Arrow Lake Gaming Performance
Gaming performance on the "Arrow Lake" Core Ultra 200 processors is so low in some games that it is fair to describe it as "broken." In some titles, the range-topping Core Ultra 9 285K falls behind even the venerable Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a CPU released over two years ago on a relatively aged platform. In our own testing, the Arrow Lake parts were at or near the bottom of the chart in our gaming benchmarks.
There's hope on the horizon, though, and it might be here sooner than you expect. If you recall, shortly after the launch of Arrow Lake, Intel's Senior Director of Technical Marketing (and AMD alum) Robert Hallock came on the HotHardware livestream to talk to us about the launch. He admitted that Intel had made some missteps, and took the blame on the company's behalf for the faults. More pressingly, though, he also noted that Intel was already working on improvements to Arrow Lake's gaming performance.
As part of those improvements we're expecting to see both software and firmware updates, which means new BIOS revisions packing new CPU microcode. Intel has already released the 0x113 microcode for Arrow Lake, but that update was mostly focused on improving memory compatibility. If folks on the ASUS ROG forums are right, it'll be the 0x114 update that brings Intel's promised performance improvements.
What kind of performance uplift are we talking about? Well, we don't really know. Hallock wasn't willing to tell us, even off the record, but we did get the impression that the improvement will be "significant." Unfortunately, that could mean anything from "a few percentage points in the worst games" all the way up to a huge performance gain that puts the Ultra 9 285K on equal footing with AMD.
Editor's Update, 12/7/24 - 3:30PM ET: Changes were made to this article to reflect insight we have gleaned on performance expectations from this microcode fix.
If this is the official update from Intel, we have it on good authority that performance restoration from this patch will be significant and perhaps more than just a few percentage points, bringing Arrow Lake gaming performance in line with Intel's initial launch reveal claims.
Regardless, we'll hope for the best. Synthetic benchmarks and microbenchmarks tell us that the Lion Cove P-cores in Arrow Lake are very fast, and our test system supports memory transfer rates at least as high as 9200 MT/s, offering extreme bandwidth in excess of 140 GB/second. It may well be the case that Intel's updates could "fix" Arrow Lake. Hopefully, we'll know for sure very soon.
