Intel has added a number of new games to the list of supported titles for its APO technology – including some big names like Fortnite and CyberPunk 2077 – and has also brought the latest Arrow Lake desktop CPUs (Core Ultra 200S) into the fold.
APO (Application Performance Optimization) is a feature that increases frame rates with supported games and processors, optimizing thread scheduling and essentially helping these games make better use of efficiency cores. The latter are the cores present in Intel’s hybrid CPUs (those since Alder Lake, the 12th generation family for Team Blue).
TechSpot noted that Intel has introduced APO support for its Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 7 265K (and 265KF). In the case of the Core Ultra 5 245K, the other Arrow Lake CPU released as part of Intel’s first arrivals, it has fewer than eight performance cores, so it has a more limited version (‘Advanced Mode’), but you’ll still get any benefit. (Each CPU must have at least six cores and be an unlocked K-series chip to use APO, we should note).
As for the new games now supported, these include Fortnite and CyberPunk 2077 as mentioned, as well as other big players like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.
The full list is as follows:
- Hero Company 3
- Counterattack 2
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Dota 2
- Fortnite
- Naraka: Bladepoint
- Gap breaker
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Little Tina’s Wonderlands
- Total War: Pharaoh
- Total War: Three Kingdoms
- Total War: Warhammer 3
Analysis: A necessary boost in a tough battle against AMD
It’s definitely good to see another dozen games, and some pretty high-profile titles, being added to the Intel APO family. With Arrow Lake, however, you could argue that Team Blue needs to make some more moves in the gaming space, so these new APO introductions are seemingly part of that effort.
In case you missed it, Arrow Lake has disappointed PC gamers quite a bit with its generation-by-generation performance improvements – it pushes efficiency more than sheer performance – something that leaks pointed out to us in advance.
Intel even readily admitted that Core Ultra 200S CPUs are 5% slower than AMD’s 7000X3D chips in gaming – and remember that the Ryzen 9800X3D is supposedly about to arrive, with a serious gen-over-gen improvement, as some are rumored to beat.
These are actually tough times for Intel, especially considering the recent debacle over 13th and 14th generation processors, which suffered from instability gremlins (which we should note is not an issue for Arrow Lake CPUs).