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Windows 11 and 10 users have been hit with a bug that affects those with Intel GPUs and causes games (or other software that uses DirectX or Direct3D) to encounter errors and crashes.
Newwin (opens in new tab) reports that Microsoft has now confirmed (opens in new tab) that the November 2022 cumulative updates (KB5019980/KB5019961 for Windows 11 and KB5019959 for Windows 10) caused this issue. To be clear, this affects PCs running on integrated graphics from an Intel CPU – not everyone using one of Intel’s dedicated Arc graphics cards.
So if you’ve encountered a DLL error (apphelp.dll to be exact) that has been messing with your PC, you now know the reason – but the important thing to note is that the bug only affects older Intel graphics driver versions .
Microsoft tells us that the issue affects Intel driver versions 26.20.100.7463 to 30.0.101.1190, and that: “This issue may be intermittent and affects apps that use DirectX or Direct3D to access some or all of their content. display.”
The software giant promises us that it is currently working on a fix, and we should get an update on when it arrives soon.
Analysis: Newer drivers, no issues
In any case, the bug is only “intermittent” according to Microsoft, which means it doesn’t necessarily happen that often, even if you’re running one of the listed Intel graphics driver versions. Those are older drivers, of course, so you really should have updated to a newer incarnation by now anyway.
It’s important to keep drivers at least relatively up-to-date, otherwise you may be missing out on important security fixes. As time passes, vulnerabilities in software and drivers are inevitably found – and nefarious types may try to exploit them. So tech companies fix drivers and apps as they go, which is why it’s always a good idea to use the very latest version.
GPU drivers can be a bit of a different story in some ways as, for example, performance levels can drop in your favorite PC games with each new driver release (this shouldn’t happen, but it does occasionally, especially with older graphics Cards). So while gamers don’t always keep their drivers on the latest version, as long as they’re using something fairly recent, they should be fine covered.
In the case of this bug, we’re talking about Intel driver versions that are at least a year old (or much further back), at which point it’s definitely time people started looking for a newer driver. This just goes to show that not only are old drivers a security risk, but they are also more prone to bugs.