Intel aims to improve gaming with AI with the Core Ultra 200S

A new architecture in the world of processors always opens the door to greater improvements than we are used to. Recently, Intel announced the Intel Core Ultra 200S family, better known to enthusiasts as “Arrow Lake”, which aims to take a step forward based on artificial intelligence without neglecting aspects such as efficiency and performance. During our activities at the Intel Extreme Masters in Rio de Janeiro, we had the opportunity to speak with Roger D. Chandler, Vice President of Intel’s Client Computing Group and General Manager of Enthusiast PC and Workstation Solutions, about the gaming and artificial intelligence applications that are expected to arrive with this new generation.

What has been improved with the Intel Core Ultra 200S?

To understand where they want to take the gaming experience, it is important to understand the changes and improvements that have been made to the processor. While we already have a whole list of technical aspects, one of the first questions we had for Chandler was a brief explanation of all these updates. “The cores get more overall performance. Each of our CPUs also has a built-in graphics, like a built-in GPU. Most desktop users and gamers are going to have a big discrete graphics right in the system, but we also have graphics built into our CPU that are used for things like media encoding,” Chandler began.

" We have a number of things across the platform when you think about there’s a performance but also how do you connect it to things. We talked about the built-in wireless connectivity, the Thunderbolt 4. We are taking fantastic performance at about half the power of previous products. So all the connectivity and all the things that are built into it as well as the AI acceleration. So there are applications today that are really exciting, that everything that’s coming out of this product is ready for that and it’s going to help inspire innovation, it’s going to help developers ramp up how they build new things, and users are going to be future ready for the things that are coming down the pipe.”

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What are the benefits of Intel Core Ultra for gaming?

Moving on to the topics we are most passionate about, the next question was what are the benefits we will have with this new architecture? In addition to performance, in addition to the various activities that we can do, something that Chandler recognizes is the future of AI and how that will be applied to gaming, thanks to the NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, which will take care of those details.

“First off, it delivers fantastic gaming performance. So, if you’re just, it’s all about the frame rates, it is a great product for gaming itself. But we’re also seeing the gaming experience is evolving, where there are a lot of gamers doing multiple things at once. They might be playing and streaming. They might be other cases,” Chandler said.

“There’s a demo in there where we have an AI application that works with all kinds of games where you can control the game with your face or your voice or gestures. You can lean and your character will lean in the game, and you don’t have to use keys and so forth. And it’s using AI, it’s using the neural processing unit. So when you think about gaming, there’s a performance where you want to high frame rate, but then there’s the experience itself. And so we feel that AI is going to start transforming gaming, and we build a product that has AI acceleration all through it. That’s helping developers, innovate and create new experiences for gaming as well.”

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Chandler’s demo allowed us to play the XDefiant shooter and move the character with our bodies. Thanks to a camera that recognized our face, we were able to move the character by tilting our head, opening our mouth to shoot, and raising our eyebrows to throw a grenade. It was an amazing experience and the idea is to integrate new ways to make the game accessible or give additional commands through our body movements.

The AI revolution in gaming

For Chandler, AI innovation is just beginning, and he sees it as “2 minutes into a 20-hour movie.” Although it seems like a new term, AI has always been a part of video games in aspects such as character or enemy behavior, but now it is at the point where it can go further.

For now, one of the most common uses is scaling. “Intel has Xe Super Sampling technology, Nvidia has DLSS, and it’s about using AI to speed up the game. You can run the game at a lower resolution and the AI will scale it up to make it look like you’re looking at 1080p.” Now, with the new architecture, the NPU can be used, for example, for gamers who are streaming and want to remove the background. “Until recently, those kinds of workloads were run on the GPU or the CPU,” Chandler explains. “If you take that AI element that does the background segmentation removal and put it on the NPU, it allows your CPU and GPU to perform much better. We’ve seen about a 20-30% gain in performance improvement.”

But what’s further down the road? Chandler sees a future where AI enables 3 cases in particular: improving player immersion, improving the way we play, and reducing online toxicity. On immersion, he discusses a scenario that is already in development. " Let’s say we’re playing a game and the graphics are fantastic. It’s hyper-realistic, it’s indistinguishable from reality. So I’m going to walk up to a non-player character and I’m going to get a drop-down text box. And no, I want to talk to the people in the game,” Chandler exclaimed. “So there are companies that are building behavior engines so you can actually talk to them. Just like when you interact with a large language model today, you can have these conversations and it seems like you’re talking to a real person. The same thing can be applied to characters in a game and you can have a voice and they can tell you things about the game.”

“Another area is player coaching. There are so many videos of some of the best players in the world playing virtually every game that’s out there online. That can be used to train AI engines so that if you’re playing your favorite game and you get stuck, you can actually have an AI coach that says, ‘Hey, look around this corner, watch out here. This is how you’re going to get through this level,’ and it can actually be like a companion to you as you play the game.”

“If you think about communities, one of the big challenges in gaming right now is toxicity. There are just people in the community that are just not nice. They say things that you don’t want your kids to hear or you don’t want to hear. AI can actually help you manage that and filter out the things you don’t want to hear. It’s not preventing other people from having a voice. It’s just protecting yourself. That’s where we see AI being used.”

The Intel Core Ultra 200S family is available today, October 24.