Intel has released a new graphics driver for its Arc A770 and A750 GPUs, along with some useful bug fixes and, more importantly, some performance improvements in some games – although some of the frame rate increases are more modest, admittedly.
How Tom’s gear (opens in a new tab) reports, driver version 31.0.101.3802 (opens in a new tab) – and note it’s still a beta – it provides up to an 8% performance boost on the flagship A770. This particular improvement applies to Dirt 5 at 1440p with “ultra-high” settings.
Another significant boost comes from Ghostwire Tokyo, which can run up to 7% faster, again at 1440p (with ‘cinema’ settings). What’s more, Gotham Nights runs up to 5% faster at 1080p with the highest presets.
There are plenty of other games that get FPS boosts, but they’re all more modest up to 3%. This includes Chorus (1440p, “epic” settings), Far Cry 6 (1080p and 1440p “ultra”), Forza Horizon 5 (1080p “extreme”, 1440p “high”), Guardians of the Galaxy (1080p “ultra”, 1440p “high”) and finally Sniper Elite 5 (1080p “ultra”).
The fresh driver also introduces support for four new games, namely Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0, Dysterra, Marvel’s Spiderman: Miles Morales, and Sonic Frontiers.
Intel has also applied a number of bug fixes here, including fixing an issue that caused stuttering in Overwatch 2 with A770 and A750 graphics cards and freezing issues in Battlefield 2042 (which happened when entering a match) and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (a ray tracing based reflection bug that could have caused a major crash).
Analysis: Heading in the right direction
Despite the numerous tweaks here – which are obviously welcome – keep in mind that this is still a beta, so the graphics driver could potentially bring some baggage of its own when it comes to bugs.
Of course, it’s good to see Intel working on not only bug fixes but performance tuning as well. Some of the increments up to around 7% to 8% are worth having, even if the caveat is that they’re “up to” – and for lower percentages, you might realistically not notice much (or at all) difference.
Still, we’re definitely not going to complain, because if Intel gradually increases FPS across games with each driver version, we’ll eventually get closer to where we want to be with Arc graphics cards – delivering a smoother, more stable experience.
When this starts to show, maybe Intel could look at it as a serious value proposition compared to what’s happening now with AMD and Nvidia (who only release expensive high-end next-gen graphics cards, or so it is everything we’ve seen so far).