New Intel Arc Alchemist drivers deliver more performance: Release date, fixed issues, and more

An Intel Arc Limited Edition reference card (Image via Intel)
An Intel Arc Limited Edition reference card (Image via Intel)

New Intel Arc Alchemist drivers promise further performance gains on the latest GPUs from Team Blue. Previously, the engineers added a ton of performance to their Arc GPUs in older DirectX 9 titles. However, the upcoming drivers will fix the issues the graphics cards are facing across the board in multiple video games.

The latest information surrounding the updated drivers was revealed by reputable Dutch Intel insider PC Games Hardware. According to them, the company will address major performance flaws with the updated Arc drivers.

The leaker also revealed a full list of games detailing the performance and stability of Arc drivers, including ray tracing support and API compatibility.


More details on the upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist drivers

The Intel Arc Alchemist video cards have been plagued by driver issues, which have led to poor performance in legacy APIs and multiple bugs. This has significantly reduced the appeal of the cards and left them lagging behind the options offered by AMD and Nvidia in terms of performance.

The Arc A770 is a solid video card, and it can easily outperform the RTX 3060 in rasterization performance. However, the card did not sell even a quarter of the Nvidia GPU due to its poor software support.

Multiple DirectX 12-based games, including F1 2021 and Halo Infinite, have been facing major issues on Intel GPUs. The following table was published on PC Games Hardware. It lists some of the plagued major titles along with the API they employ, their ray tracing performance, and major issues.

All the major games on the market and their compatibility issues (Image via PC Games Hardware)
All the major games on the market and their compatibility issues (Image via PC Games Hardware)

It is worth noting that the table above lists the current conditions of the Arc Alchemist drivers, including issues that will likely be addressed with the upcoming major update.

In a blog post, PC Games Hardware stated:

"...as we have heard from well-informed circles, Intel is currently preparing a major driver update that is intended to increase performance across the board – apparently one of the undoubtedly existing brakes has been identified and eliminated."

PC Games Hardware, however, did not reveal a release date for the Intel Arc Alchemist drivers.


The future looks promising

If the company is able to improve performance and fully utilize the potential of the underlying technology in the next few months, it could position Intel's discrete GPUs as a strong alternative to those offered by Nvidia and AMD.

With Intel engineers hard at work improving the performance of Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs post-launch, the future of Intel AXG looks promising.

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