Leaked Intel slides reveal Core Ultra 9 285K is overall slower but less power-hungry than i9-14900K in games, AMD comparisons also included

Intel’s Arrow Lake-S performance slides have already been leaked by a Chinese news outlet ahead of the official launch that is expected to happen in a few days, and the numbers are not looking mighty impressive. In fact, the top-of-the-line Core Ultra 9 285K is presented to be slower than Intel’s fastest current gen Raptor Lake-R, and even AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D series beat it, at least in intensive gaming scenarios. The only silver lining here is Arrow Lake’s superior power efficiency.

Granted, the Core Ultra 9 285K is only lagging behind by a few fps compared to the i9-14900K. The slide shows the Arrow Lake-S processor averaging 261 fps versus 264 fps for i9-14900K. Strangely enough, Intel appears to be showing total system power consumption instead of CPU power consumption, where the Core Ultra 9 285K system is 80 W more power efficient while averaging the same performance as the Raptor Lake-R system.

Raw performance does not seem to be the focus of the new Arrow Lake series. Instead, Intel’s shift to the N3 manufacturing process from TSMC is enabling lower TDPs for mostly the same performance, or in select cases, up to 15% higher performance. Another slide shows how the Core Ultra 9 285K is on par with the i9-14900K while power consumption goes down 34-58 W, whereas some games could see 4-6% performance increase with up to 165 W TDP reduction. The slide is not clear on the exact TDPs for the 15% performance gains in F1 23.

The leak also includes two slides comparing the Core Ultra 9 285K with AMD’s previous gen and newer Ryzen 9000 series. For productivity tests, the Arrow Lake-S flagship model is up to 30% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. No surprise here, Intel has always maintained the lead with productivity and content creation scenarios for the past few generations. However, the game benchmarks do not look as rosy, as the Arrow Lake-S is up to 15% faster in some cases, but up to 21 % slower in games like Cyberpunk 2077, so overall slower, and Intel is not even pitting it against the 7800X3D that still remains overall fastest for games.

Compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Core Ultra 9 285K is on par in most cases, with three wins and five losses, netting a 0.26% overall performance advantage. This slide is not that helpful since it does not mention TDPs for any of the CPU models. Moreover, there is a fine print mentioning that results use Application Optimized (APO) code that usually boosts results in Intel’s favor.