Intel is continuing its relentless march of Arc driver updates with version 31.0.101.4644, bringing optimisations to newly released games and fixes for a plethora of bugs.
Among the problems eliminated by this update we have; crashes while launching Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, Blender render crashes when ray tracing is enabled, system hangs while waking up from sleep, and much to our delight, a fix for high system power consumption during sleep or hibernate.
Welcome progress for those who’ve opted to give Intel Arc a go, and a bunch of other issues have been identified for a future update. These include crashes in Shadow of The Tomb Raider and Adobe After Effects, texture corruption in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, driver installation fails with Iris Xe + Iris Xe Max devices, and game captures creating multiple video files. Arc GPUs still have a way to go, but Intel’s commitment to regular updates has to be applauded.
The latest driver also includes Game On support for Wayfinder and Madden NFL 24, with Intel claiming 42 per cent higher performance per dollar than Nvidia’s RTX 3060 12GB graphics card in the latter at 1080p Ultra and 49 per cent at 1440p High.
Arc driver version 31.0.101.4644 can be downloaded from Intel’s website here.
The full list of changes goes as follows:
Gaming Highlights
Intel Game On Driver support on Intel Arc A-series Graphics for:
- Madden NFL 24
- Wayfinder
Fixed Issues
Intel Arc Graphics Products:
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (DX12) may experience an application crash while launching game.
- System may hang while waking up from sleep. May need to power cycle the system for recovery.
- Blender 3.6 may experience an application crash during render operations when Hardware Ray Tracing is enabled.
Intel Arc Control:
- Virtual Camera may intermittently fail to engage on the Camera page.
- Release Notes in Intel Arc Control driver page may show unformatted HTML data.
- “Sort by” dropdown in the Games Page may be missing after using “Reset application to default.”
- Toggling the Virtual Camera enablement may show as disabled during onscreen capture in the Capture page.
- On-screen Capture and Highlights capture may turn off while using multiple displays when moving Intel Arc Control window across displays.
- Clean Installation option may not be available in Arc Driver page while updating to WHQL driver.
- Preview toggle may incorrectly enable when the camera is used by the Windows camera application.
- With Intel Arc Control installed, systems may experience slightly higher than expected power consumption during system sleep or hibernate.
- Background Blur effects with Virtual Camera may not change when setting blur strength from 50% to 100%.
- On-screen camera may not come up when capturing games in full screen mode
- Last captured image may persist in On-screen camera preview after disconnecting camera.
Known Issues
Intel Arc Graphics Products:
- Shadow of The Tomb Raider (DX11) may experience an application crash after loading to game menu.
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (DX12) may exhibit texture corruption on characters.
- Topaz Video AI may experience errors when using some models for video enhancement.
- Adobe After Effects may experience an application crash during render operations.
Intel Iris Xe MAX Graphics Products:
- Driver installation may not complete successfully on certain 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 successful installation.
Intel Arc Control:
- Using Arc Control Studio capture with certain games may incorrectly generate multiple video files.
- The “Connector” type in the Display page may incorrectly show DP when using an HDMI display connection.
- May observe “stream has already ended” pop-up after the power events with Capture/Highlights/Broadcast toggle on.
- Performance Graphs may scale incorrectly after waking up from sleep.
