Intel's Latest Arc GPU Driver Claims Massive FPS Improvements Up To A Staggering 750%
That's just one of the five games that Intel's Arc driver version 4952 has 'Game On' driver support for. The others are first-person puzzler The Talos Principle 2, throwback JPRG remake Star Ocean II R, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, and of course, the latest Call of Duty title, Modern Warfare III.
As much as we're looking forward to these new and upcoming releases, though, arguably the really exciting news in this driver release are the performance fixes for existing titles. Third-person pseudo-Rogue-like shooter Returnal, which was a showcase title for the PlayStation 5, sees a 53% boost in average FPS when using Epic ray-tracing. Guild Wars 2 sees the same uplift at ultra settings, and World War Z apparently speeds up by 113%.
Of course, you want to know what game sees that insane 7.5x performance gain we mentioned in the headline. That title is Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Microsoft's re-release of its seminal shooter franchise and arguably the game series that made Sony pay $3.6B for Bungie has been effectively broken on Intel's Arc graphics for some time now. Well, not anymore, it seems. Intel doesn't say which game of the collection sees this huge jump, but we'd be really surprised if the whole series isn't quite playable on Arc now.
Halo: Reach in The Master Chief Collection
Other titles that Intel is promising major optimizations for are as follows:
- The Talos Principle 2: 19% gain at 1440p with High Settings
- Sid Meier’s Civilization V: 6% FPS uplift at 1080p with High settings
- Total War: Warhammer: 10% boost at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Lost Ark: a 15% average FPS gain at 1080p with Very High settings
- Warhammer: Vermintide 2: 16% improvement at 1080p with Extreme settings
- Sniper Elite 3: 37% better average FPS at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Euro Truck Simulator 2: 27% average FPS uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Yakuza 0: a crazy 154% (!) FPS gain at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare: 20% uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Alien: Isolation: 9% average improvement at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Far Cry Primal: a 14% FPS boost at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Far Cry 5: also a 14% FPS boost at 1080p with Ultra settings
- Far Cry New Dawn: 11% average FPS uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings
With the exception of The Talos Principle, all of the games seeing performance gains in this driver are based on the DX11 API.
We continue to be pleased and impressed with Intel's progress on Arc. While even the fastest Alchemist GPU (the Arc A770) isn't knocking our socks off with its performance, it continues to develop into a reasonable third option at the entry level of the market. The rapid pace of Intel's work on its drivers gives us some hope for the competitiveness of the second-generation Arc graphics, known as Battlemage and expected to launch next year.
Of course, this driver isn't just for discrete Arc graphics, but also for the integrated graphics on Intel's 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th-generation CPUs which are fundamentally based on the same graphics technology. We're be curious to see how Halo runs on the integrated graphics of an Intel CPU. If you test it out, let us know.
