Gaming is looking like a much better prospect for Intel Arrow Lake CPUs now, thanks to the latest Cyberpunk 2077 update. Noticing that the patch notes stated that the game is around 33% faster now on Intel Arrow Lake chips, I decided to try it out for myself on an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K. The results are absolutely transformative, turning this Intel CPU into a genuine gaming contender.
I first benchmarked this Intel CPU in Cyberpunk 2077 for our my Core Ultra 7 265K review, and the results were shockingly bad. Not only was there no hope of this CPU competing with the latest chips from AMD, but it was even well behind all of Intel’s own 14th-gen CPUs. This was categorically not the best gaming CPU.
It looked as though the writing was on the wall for Intel when we conducted our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review a few days later, but the new Cyberpunk 2077 2.2 update promises to change all that, at least in this one game. Meanwhile, Intel has also issued a new 0x113 microcode update with the promise of improved gaming performance (and a new 0x114 update is coming soon too), so I thought it was time for a rebench of this CPU, with a new BIOS and updated copy of Cyberpunk 2077, using our GeForce RTX 4080 test GPU.
As it turns out, 33% is an understatement of the effect of this update. After dropping down to 1080p at the High preset, with no ray tracing or DLSS, putting as much of a burden on the CPU as possible, the performance increase is an incredible 91%. A part of that increase is, of course, down to the fact that the first result was so low.
The original average frame rate in this test for the 265K was an abysmal 114fps, which is actually the same result it achieved in the same game with Ultra ray tracing settings, suggesting a serious bottleneck somewhere. With the latest update and microcode, however, this result rocketed all the way up to 218fps, while the minimum of 179fps is unrecognizable compared with the 88fps of before.
After seeing that, I wondered how the new update would affect the CPU’s performance if you enabled all the eye candy, so I switched to the Ultra ray tracing preset, with DLSS Super Resolution on the Quality setting. Again, the jump is substantial, but not to the same degree, as it basically has the same starting point.
At these settings, the Core Ultra 265K now averages 141fps, compared with 117fps before, making for a 20.5% performance increase. Meanwhile, the minimum has also increased from 88fps to 117fps. Comparing the 265K against the rest of the field shows it’s now in front of the Core i5 14600K, but it’s still lagging a bit behind the rest of the competition.
Intel’s Core i9 14900K is still a better gaming CPU, as are the AMD Ryzen X3D chips, but the difference has closed significantly, meaning the Core Ultra 265K is no longer embarrassingly terrible, at least in this game. You could build a gaming PC based on this CPU and not be frustrated with the poor performance in this game now.
Maybe it’s not all over for Intel in the gaming CPU world after all, especially if more games receive optimizations for Intel Arrow Lake. If you’re planning to build a gaming PC based on one of these new CPUs, or a new AMD chip, check out our guide to the best gaming motherboard, where we take you through all our favorite options at a range of prices.