Intel Game On Drivers Get Luanch-Day Support For The Settlers: New Allies, Company of Heroes 3

Intel released the newest Game On Driver for the company’s Arc Graphics to optimize games on the day of launch so that games look great and perform well with its graphics cards. This update supports five new games that the company states are “the most anticipated games of 2023” and will support 11th through 13th Gen Core processors, Iris Xe Dedicated Graphics, and Arc Graphics.

Intel shocases more than 60% performance per dollar for against NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB graphics card for The Settlers: New Allies, Company of Heroes 3 and Like a Dragon: Inshin!

The newest update, version 31.0.101.4125, was released yesterday, with users finding support in several titles, such as:

• Atomic Heart
• Company of Heroes 3
• Like a Dragon: Ishin!
• Wild Hearts
• The Settlers: New Allies

As with any new update, users should be careful and back up their data so that no information loss will happen in case of a compatibility issue or bug.

Intel has provided some benchmarks of the newest update, covering two games released since the last Game On driver update, The Settlers: New Allies and Returnal. The company wants users to see the difference in performance and the performance per dollar when choosing Intel over the company’s competition.

They present the PC configurations of both systems, with the Intel Arc A750 GPU, faced up against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GPU. The systems use the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 Hero with the Corsair DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 DRAM, Corsair MP600 Pro XT 4 TB NVMe.

The first slide shows the Intel Arc A750 Game On Driver performance with the abovementioned games. They tested 1080p and 1440p resolutions and compared the graphics card against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 12GB GPU. In Returnal, for both resolutions, the Intel Arc A750 GPU outperformed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB graphics card by improving three frames per second in 1080p and four frames per second in 1440p benchmarks. The results were even better in The Settlers: New Allies, where the Intel Arc A750 saw a ten average fps boost over the NVIDIA GPU and a 16 fps improvement over NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 12GB graphics card. The difference between the two tests was a four to fourteen percent improvement.

The second slide shows the normalized performance per dollar against the exact NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB GPU, where Intel showed a 62% to 75% increase overall between the two titles. In the small print, the company mentions the price of the NVIDIA GPU was $383 compared to Intel’s GPU at $249 — a difference of $134 in favor of the Intel Arc A750 performance.

NVIDIA has been transparent about Intel’s QA testing with their Game On drivers, stating that the company does “not crowd-sourced driver QA testing with public betas, we do it ourselves. That is why every GeForce Game Ready Driver is WHQL-certified by Microsoft.”

Intel’s newest driver can be downloaded here.

Below we have listed some crucial sections that users should know before downloading the latest Intel Game On driver:

KNOWN ISSUES:

Intel® Arc™ Graphics Products:

• Red Dead Redemption 2* (Vulkan) may experience an application crash in benchmark mode when Screen Type is Fullscreen.
• Halo Infinite* (DX12) may exhibit color corruption during gameplay when Reflections settings are enabled.
• Sea of Thieves* (DX11) may exhibit color corruption on water edges.
• Conqueror’s Blade* (DX11) may exhibit corruption in benchmark mode.
• The system may hang while waking up from sleep. We may need to power cycle the recovery plan.
• GPU hardware acceleration may not be available for media playback and encoding with some versions of Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Blender may exhibit corruption while using the Nishita Sky texture node.

Intel® Iris™ Xe MAX Graphics Products:

• Driver installation may not complete successfully on specific notebook systems with both Intel® Iris™ Xe + Iris™ Xe MAX devices. A system reboot and re-installation of the graphics driver may be required for a successful installation.

Intel® Core™ Processor Products:

• Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection* (DX12) may exhibit texture or striped corruption during gameplay.
• Warhammer 40,000: Darktide* (DX12) may exhibit texture or striped corruption during gameplay.
• Dysterra* (DX12) may exhibit texture corruption during gameplay.
• Total War: Warhammer III* (DX11) may experience an application crash when loading battle scenarios.
• Call of Duty Warzone 2.0* (DX12) may exhibit corruption on specific buildings and floors during gameplay.
• Conqueror’s Blade* (DX12) may experience an application crash during the game launch.
• A Plague Tale: Requiem* (DX12) may experience application instability during gameplay.

INTEL® ARC™ CONTROL KNOWN ISSUES:

• Windows UAC Admin is required to install and launch Arc Control.
• The Live Performance Monitoring page may not apply the desired removal of some performance metric tiles.
• The Resizable Bar status may show an incorrect value on systems with multiple Intel® Graphics Adapters.
• Arc Control Studio capture with certain games may incorrectly generate multiple video files.
• Using Arc Control Studio capture with the AVC codec selected may incorrectly use the HEVC codec.
• Modifying performance sliders may fail to apply back to their default values. A workaround is to use the “Reset to Defaults” button.

Intel® Arc™ Control Performance Tuning (BETA):

• Intel® Arc™ Control Performance Tuning is currently in Beta. As such, performance and features may behave unexpectedly. Intel® will continue to refine the Performance Tuning software in future releases.

News Source: Intel