Intel has admitted that its new flagship gaming CPUs won’t be able to compete with AMD’s next-gen X3D CPUs when they launch. The lid has just been lifted on the new Intel Arrow Lake gaming CPU lineup, with the company spilling the beans on the new Core Ultra 9 285K, as well as several other chips. However, Intel has had to be upfront when it comes to gaming – the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D will be faster.
The performance deficit was revealed in an Intel Arrow Lake Q&A session we attended, where Intel VP of technical marketing, Robert Hallock was quizzed about the new CPUs’ gaming performance. Make no mistake, the new Core Ultra 9 285K will not be the best gaming CPU, even according to Intel.
When asked about the new chips’ performance in comparison to AMD’s forthcoming Ryzen 9000X3D chips, Hallock, who used to work for AMD, admitted that “I think we’ll be about 5% back compared to [new] X3D parts, clarifying that “you’ll see about a 5% deficit, and I want to be clear about that.”
During the press briefing on Arrow Lake, Intel had already made the dubious choice to compare the Core Ultra 9 285K to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in most of its gaming tests, which isn’t an X3D chip. Even then, the 9950X outperforms the new 285K in several tests, including Cyberpunk 2077, F1 24, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
A later slide then showed five games tested against the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, a last-gen X3D chip based on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture. In this slide, Cyberpunk 2077 was 21% slower on the new Core Ultra 9 285K than on the 7950X3D, while Far Cry 6 was 13% slower. The Intel chip was faster in a couple of games too, but it looks as though most of that benefit could be eaten by the new AMD Ryzen 9800X3D when it arrives.
Intel is mainly focusing on power efficiency and improved multi-threaded performance with Arrow Lake, but it looks as though gaming has taken a bit of a back seat. Intel has even admitted that its last-gen Core i9 14900K also outperforms the new Core Ultra 285K in some game tests, but says the latter has the benefit of significantly lower power draw and operating temperatures.
On the plus side, it looks as though the Core Ultra 9 285K will be quick in heavily multi-threaded content creation software, and it also has a built-in neural processing unit (NPU), which you don’t get in any of AMD’s desktop CPUs yet. Intel says the Arrow Lake NPU performs at 13 TOPS, although that’s still a fair way short of the 40+ TOPS Microsoft specified are required to run its Copilot+ PC features as intended.
Intel is set to release Arrow Lake just two weeks from now, and the new platform will require DDR5 memory, so check out our guide to the best gaming RAM if you’re planning to build a gaming PC based on one of the new chips.