Intel Arc A770 GPU has a new driver – and it’s good and bad news
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Intel has released a new graphics driver for its Arc A770 and A750 GPUs, complete with some helpful bug fixes and, more importantly, some performance improvements for some games – although some of the frame rate increases are more modest, admittedly.
As Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) reports, driver version 31.0.101.3802 (opens in new tab) – and note that this is still a beta – brings up to an 8% performance boost to the flagship A770. That particular improvement comes for Dirt 5 at 1440p resolution with “ultra-high” settings.
Another big boost comes with Ghostwire Tokyo, which can run up to 7% faster, again at 1440p (with ‘cinematic’ settings). In addition, Gotham Nights runs up to 5% faster at 1080p resolution with the highest preset settings.
There are a number of other games that get frame rate boosts, but they are all more modest at 3%. That 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 series of bug fixes here, including the fix for an issue that was causing stuttering in Overwatch 2 with the A770 and A750 graphics cards, and game crashing issues with Battlefield 2042 (which happened when entering a match) plus Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (a ray-traced reflection bug that can cause a hard crash).
Analysis: on the right track
Despite the many fixes here – which are welcome, of course – please note that this is still a beta version, so the graphics driver may have some bugs.
However, it’s clearly good to see Intel working to not only fix glitches, but fine-tune performance as well. Some of the gains up to about 7% to 8% here are worth having, even if the caveat is that they’re ‘on’ – and in the case of the lower percentages you may realistically not notice much (or any ) difference.
Still, we’re certainly not going to complain, because if Intel steadily ramps up framerates in different games with each driver release, we’ll eventually get closer to where we want to be with Arc graphics cards – delivering smoother and more stable performance.
Once that starts to become arguable, maybe Intel can try to make a serious value proposition compared to what’s happening now with AMD and Nvidia (which only release expensive high-end next-gen graphics cards, or at least that’s all we seen so far).