Intel Arc Driver Rolls Out Fixes For Battlemage GPUs In Elden Ring, Homeworld And More Games
Have you checked out our review of Intel's Arc B580 "Battlemage" GPU yet? Hopefully, you already have and you're well aware that the Arc B580 is a competent entry-level GPU with solid 1080p and 1440p performance. We benchmarked 20 games, though, including the usual suspects alongside some more unusual titles, like Teardown, Zenless Zone Zero, and indie FPS Selaco, so there's plenty to digest.
(Selaco)
Actually, while testing that last game, we ran into a showstopper issue that we then reported to Intel. That's one of several major issues fixed in this first driver update after the launch of Arc Battlemage. Selaco no longer crashes in Vulkan mode, and runs much better as a result of not having to use the OpenGL fallback. A similar issue with Homeworld 3 should be solved, too.
We also observed some slightly shaky frame-times in Elden Ring despite how well the game ran otherwise. That problem has similarly been sewed-up now by Intel, with the game running smooth as butter on its second-generation discrete GPUs. Meanwhile, F1 24 and The Crew Motorfest both had image corruption issues, but Intel says those warts have been removed in this latest driver too.
Like any piece of software as complex as a graphics driver, Intel Graphics driver version 101.6325 does still have a few known issues. F1 24 may be a little buggy when XeSS FG is enabled; in particular, don't toggle XeSS FG during gameplay, but rather in the pre-race menu. MLPerf still needs the integrated GPU disabled on machines that have Intel iGPUs, and Topaz Labs Photo AI may suffer image corruption. Magix Vegas Pro can also end up with corruption using the "style transfer" feature. CATIA may crash if you enable HQAO, and Lightroom Classic may run poorly until you manually enable GPU acceleration.
Intel has done nothing but impress with its work on its graphics drivers to date, and being nearly on par with AMD and NVIDIA at this point in terms of graphics driver quality after just a couple of years is an astonishing achievement. We're pleased to see the Intel graphics team directly addressing reported issues with such immediacy; hopefully this trend will continue despite the sea change at Intel.
You can grab the latest Arc drivers from Intel's download site.
