Yes, Intel Arc Can Run Crysis And The Latest GPU Driver Gives It An FPS Boost
It's been nearly two decades since Crysis came out and brought modern gaming PCs (for the time period) to their knees (and four years since Crysis Remastered), prompting the popular meme, 'Yeah, but can it run Crysis?', which was the result steep system requirements and poor software optimizations. Lest there be any doubt, however, Intel's Arc GPUs can indeed run Crysis, now with a performance boost to boot.
Intel's latest Arc GPU driver release—version 31.0.101.5590 WHQL—comes with the promise of a respectable 10% FPS uplift for desktop A-series graphics cards, applicable to playing the game at 1080p with Very High settings. And for Intel's Core Ultra CPUs based on Meteor Lake with integrated Arc graphics, the latest driver claims to boost FPS by 6% on average at 1080p with Extreme settings.
Calling out Crysis would be unusual for any other GPU maker (AMD and NVIDIA), but that isn't really the case for Intel. That's because Intel is still relatively new to the modern discrete GPU scene and part of the ongoing maturation process involves buttoning up performance on older games, to bring some level of parity with the competition. That effort has led to some huge performance gains on occasion.
Intel's newest Arc GPU driver doesn't reach triple-digit percentage territory, but in addition to giving Crysis a modest boost, it also purportedly delivers solid gains in Chivalry 2 (DX11) with a claimed 13% FPS uplift for A-series desktop GPUs running the game at 1080p with Epic settings, and up to 16% for Core Ultra CPUs with built-in Arc GPUs at 1080p with Medium settings.
Of course, Intel's driver team is not just wholly focused on older titles. Intel's been really good at pushing out timely GPU driver releases to support new games as well, which in this case includes 'Game On' support for the Destiny 2: The Final Shape expansion and Eldin Ring Shadow of the Erdtree. You can think of Game On as Intel's equivalent to NVIDIA's 'Game Ready' driver branding, which simply points to day-1 optimizations for new games.
Outside of faster performance, the latest Arc GPU driver fixes an issue that was causing No Rest for the Wicked (DX11) to crash intermittently. However, there are several known issues that have not yet been corrected, including some Vulkan-related bugs that are causing No Man's Sky and Enshrouded to crash, as well as intermittent flickering in Doom Eternal (among other issues).
Check out the release notes (PDF) for the full list of known issues, and head to Intel's Arc GPU driver page to download the latest release.
