The consumer response to Intel’s Core Ultra line-up has been largely one of indifference. The older 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake processors have continued to outsell the newer Arrow Lake CPUs, which appears to have not only prompted a price hike for the older chips, but also a new marketing strategy.
Updated marketing materials show that Intel is trying to attract PC gaming enthusiasts to the Core Ultra line. To do this, the company is using performance charts comparing the Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs to AMD’s Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 offerings. For instance, the top-of-the-line Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
The graph presented by Intel claims that the Core Ultra 9 285K is on par with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D in games such as Alan Wake 2 and Starfield, and exceeds it in content creation tasks. Furthermore, Intel claims that the Core Ultra 9 offers better value, with another graph claiming it can provide 15 percent better ‘Elite gaming performance per dollar.’
This is a curious way of attracting interest, since our tests comparing the Core Ultra 9 285K with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X showed the AMD chip out-performing the Intel CPU in all gaming scenarios, even without the benefit of the additional 3D V-Cache of the X3D version. The difference was particularly stark at 1440p resolutions, but Intel’s figures appear to only show 1080p test results.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is certainly the cheaper and more power-efficient CPU. In addition, Intel has recently released a significant update to the Core Ultra microcode that has made some considerable gaming improvements across the board. This combined with lower prices and efficiency gains might be enough to tempt some PC builders back to Team Blue. However, Intel may need some more impressive gaming performance figures if it is going to make a comeback against AMD and win back PC gaming enthusiasts.
