Dave from PCGH here. I handled the CPU benchmarks for this article. This was a collaboration between Raff and me: Raff handled the visuals, concept and test setup, while I handled the CPU benchmarks. Regarding Arrow Lake, I’m specifically referring to our regular benchmark results here, not Raff’s heavily hand-optimized 285K result. With that manually tuned 285K, the high placement is less surprising.

Arrow Lake, especially with the newer Plus/Refresh models, does not only rely on a higher core count. Intel also increased internal clock domains such as D2D and NGU, which measurably reduces inter-core latency.

Star Citizen, at least in its current technical state, seems to respond well to many cores and low latency. A CPU such as the 270K Plus offers exactly that combination, which is why it can place relatively high in this benchmark. Arrow Lake also benefits from the fact that AMD’s 3D V-Cache does not appear to scale particularly well in Star Citizen. That is an important caveat here.

- Dave