Seemingly out of nowhere, the devs behind Cyberpunk 2077 have dropped a massive update to the game despite previous claims that support had ended for the title. The new update brings with it an onslaught of gameplay changes and updates, including performance enhancements. Update 2.2 promotes a whopping 33% performance improvement on Core Ultra 200S series CPUs.
Specifically, the devs reveal that CPU threading has been "optimized" on Arrow Lake-based CPUs, which alone is responsible for the 33% performance uplift. Intel previously confirmed that it would fix Arrow Lake-S' through firmware/BIOS updates, but it also revealed that at least some of the architecture's performance issues would be rectified through game-specific updates as well. The latter is what we are now seemingly seeing from Cyberpunk 2077's latest update.
A 33% uplift is massive and would put the Core Ultra 200S series CPUs in a completely different performance category compared to where it is today. In our review of the Core Ultra 9 285K, we found that the CPU, along with its Core Ultra 5 counterpart, were at the bottom of our benchmark chart for Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra settings (update 2.13), only surpassing the lowly Core i5-14400. In fact, performance was so bad at launch that Intel's four-generation old Core i9-12900K outperformed the two Arrow Lake chips, even with the Arrow Lake CPUs running with ultra-fast 8200MHz CUDIMM memory.
Based on average frame rates from our own Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, a 33% improvement would catapult the Core Ultra 9 285K from 88.4 FPS average to 117.57 FPS. This would be enough to outperform the Core i9-14900K and effectively tie the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. The same would also be the case for the Core Ultra 5 245K.
That said, an average frame rate of 117.57 FPS would still not be enough to match the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which outputs an average frame rate of 133.1 FPS at stock and 143.9 FPS with PBO enabled in our testing of the game. Regardless, a 33% improvement would put the Arrow Lake chips in a much more competitive light and see them outperform their Intel-based Raptor Lake Refresh predecessors. It will be interesting to see if other major games deliver similar performance-boosting updates in the coming weeks and months.
