Intel has just launched an updated driver for its portfolio of graphics products and it seems to be heavily skewed towards addressing Battlemage issues. That's welcome news for early adopters of the Intel Arc B580, which made splashdown earlier this month starting at $249 with praise coming from far and wide. However, the driver is also worth grabbing for owners of Arc A-series graphics cards, and users of systems powered by the Core Ultra Series 1 & 2 processors (Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake) with Arc graphics.
Those grabbing this update will benefit from some major bugs being quashed from a handful of AAA games. Specifically, Intel says that startup application crashes experienced by Saleco and Homeworld 3 players will be banished. It also notes that flickering and screen corruption issues in The Crew Motorfest, F1 24, and Elder Ring are now fixed. However, some screen corruption can still crop up in F1 24, during night scenes...
Moving onto Known Issues for Arc B850 owners, we have quite a long list to digest – at least Intel is aware of these and having noted them publicly will be working on fixes. Again F1 24 appears to be a problem, but here some XeSS wrinkles need attention – one of which can be bad enough to cause a crash (toggling full screen with Alt-Enter). Intel devs are also trying to fix a startup crash in Skull and Bones.
There is plenty of work being done on serious app compatibility too. Intel is aware of issues in popular software like Adobe Lightroom Classic, Magix Vegas Pro, and Topaz Labs Photo AI – and is busy ironing them out. It also raises concerns over MLPerf on multi-GPU configs and issues with certain capture cards.
In contrast, the Intel Arc A-series fixes cover just two things: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 shadows, and intermittent Topaz Gigapixel AI export crashes. There are no Known Issues for this series.
If you are an owner of a laptop with an Intel Meteor Lake or Lunar Lake processor, it still looks like grabbing this update is worthwhile, particularly for Davinci Resolve Studio v19.0, Topaz Video AI, and Adobe Premiere Pro users.
Intel Graphics Software gets some attention, too
That's not all. As well as fixing the wide range of third-party software compatibility issues mentioned above, Intel continues to iron out wrinkles in the Intel Graphics Software. Patched in this release are a number of crashing issues, and settings snafus such as the "FPS Limiter may not limit FPS with VSync ON and Low Latency Mode enabled" doh.
In the driver release notes, linked top, you will see this driver was released on Friday and is version 32.0.101.6325 WHQL and 32.0.101.6253 Non-WHQL. Search Intel's drivers page, or fire up your existing Intel GPU control software to grab the appropriate release. These drivers are available for Windows 10 22H2 users, plus Windows 11 21H2 users and newer.
