Intel Arc GPUs have just been revealed, with Team Blue launching lower-end laptop models first, and now we’ve witnessed the initial release of the Arc driver which those buying a gaming notebook with an Alchemist graphics solution inside will be using.
Driver quality is something that’s immediately going to be under the spotlight, as gamers will be keen to see that Intel has got not just the hardware right, but also the software side of the equation, which is equally vital for good performance.
So, if you’re picking up a gaming laptop with an Arc A350M or A370M GPU inside, you’ll naturally be wondering which games might cause you some grief, and that’s something we now know thanks to Intel’s initial driver (version 30.0.101.1325) release notes [PDF] which highlight all known issues.
The Arc Graphics Driver has gremlins in the works for a number of PC games, with the full list as follows:
- A Total War Saga: Troy may experience an application crash when the campaign is launched and ‘Ultra’ quality game settings are selected
- Back 4 Blood may experience lighting or texture corruption when the mist is visible on screen
- Forza Horizon 5 may experience an application crash when launching the game
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War may experience an application crash when launching the game
- FIFA 22 may experience an intermittent application crash during regular gameplay
- CrossFire map textures may fail to load or may load as blank surfaces
- Gears 5 may experience terrain corruption when using medium or higher quality graphics quality settings
- Halo Infinite may fail to load some objects and textures and lighting may also appear blurry or overexposed in the multiplayer game menus
- Guardians of the Galaxy may exhibit texture corruption on some interactable objects in-game
- Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition may experience minor texture corruption in-game
- Naraka: Bladepoint may experience texture corruption or flickering on some ground surfaces
- Rust may intermittently experience an application crash when joining a new server
Analysis: Fingers crossed on the ‘unknown issues’ front
The good news is that this list isn’t overly long, and the issues are in some cases dependent on settings, or they only happen with certain surfaces or textures. The bigger bugbears are present in FIFA 22 – ‘intermittent crashing in regular gameplay’ sounds ominous and potentially frustrating – plus Forza Horizon 5 and Call of Duty which can crash upon launch.
Obviously, it was expected that there’d be some problems – indeed, even with mature drivers like AMD and Nvidia, there are still issues cropping up on an ongoing basis – and there may well be unknown issues with Intel’s new driver. In fact, you can pretty much count on it, and problems will be flagged to Intel as this initial Arc driver is more widely used when greater numbers of people get laptops with Alchemist GPUs.
We’ll just have to see how things pan out, with the first notebooks using the Arc A350M or A370M debuting now, Intel told us at yesterday’s launch (or imminently, certainly).
Another interesting point with these new mobile GPUs is Arc Control, a control panel that looks very smart and gives the user easy access to performance monitoring and tweaking, as well as cool features such as automatically saving clips of game highlights. There are glitches in the initial implementation of Arc Control, too, and those are also listed in Intel’s driver release notes as you might expect.
Via VideoCardz
