In its first party testing, when averaged across 12 game tests, which we used Google optical translation to make out the titles of, Intel used performance numbers of the i9-14900K as the mean. The 285K beats the i9-14900K in only four games—Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Age of Mythology Retold, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and F1 23. It’s on-par with the i9-14900K in Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Pharaoh, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Rainbow Six Siege. It’s slower than the i9-14900K in Far Cry 6, FF XIV, F1 24, Red Dead Redemption 2. Averaged across this bench, the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up roughly on par with the Core i9-14900K in gaming. Intel also compared the 285K to AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X, and interestingly, even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.
Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K Performance Claims Leaked, Doesn’t Beat i9-14900K at Gaming
The Chinese tech press is abuzz with slides allegedly from Intel’s pre-launch press-deck for the Core Ultra 2-series “Arrow Lake-S.” The most sensational of these are Intel’s first-party performance claims for the top Core Ultra 9 285K model. There’s good news and bad news. Good news first—Intel claims to have made a big leap in energy efficiency with “Arrow Lake,” and the 285K should offer gaming performance comparable to the current Core i9-14900K at around 80 W lower power draw for the processor. But then there in lies the bad news—despite claimed IPC gains for the “Lion Cove” P-core, and rumored clock speeds being on par with the “Raptor Cove” P-cores on the i9-14900K, the 285K is barely any faster than its predecessor in absolute terms.