Intel just released a new driver targeting specifically issues gamers have had when playing Starfield using their Arc or Iris series graphics cards.
If you’re one of the few people to have taken the leap of faith and purchased one of the Intel Arc series graphics cards, you might have wanted to play Starfield with them. And while the cards are primarily targeting mid and lower-end use cases for games, it’s not unreasonable to think that some will also want to play brand-new and more demanding games like Starfield on them. So gamers who were rocking the A-Series or Iris Xe GPUs were a bit annoyed when they discovered that they were plagued by constant crashes, screen tearing, graphical artifacts, and even the game straight up refusing to launch when they first got their hands on it either yesterday for the official launch, or a week ago for the early access.
Intel has been paying close attention however and just released a new update (Intel Graphics Driver 31.0.101.4672) which reports to fix many if not all of the most severe issues found when pairing an Intel GPU with Starfield. Among the fixes we can find improvements to game load times and stability fixes to reduce frame dips and visual artifacts.
Intel does however note that gamers should only expect decent performance and stability on high presents and lower (high being presumably exclusive to the Arc A770), and mentions that there are still quite a few known issues in Starfield specifically that their engineers are hard at work fixing. Among them: issues with resolution scaling causing artifacts and crashing, issues with texture flickering, issues with texture loading in higher levels of detail when the player gets close (LOD), and more.
This driver update was focused on Starfield, but Intel does also mention that there are several updates coming soon which should fix issues players are reporting in other games, they highlight especially Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves, Halo Infinite, and Dead by Daylight. As well as fixing coming for non-gaming apps like Adobe After Effects and Topaz Video AI. Finally, they are looking to fix an issue which would cause the integrated GPU fans to ramp up frequently and unexpectedly.
You can find the full Intel Graphics driver version 31.0.101.4672 release notes in the linked PDF directly from Intel. And if you’re reading this and wondering “since when did Intel make GPUs, are they any good?” make sure to check out Christian’s articles on either the Intel Arc A770, the Intel Arc A750, or the Intel Arc A380, arranged from the highest end to the lowest end respectively.
