A nearly 9-year-old game gets a huge performance boost on Intel Arc GPUs.
Intel released a new BETA driver (31.0.101.4514), focusing on further game optimization. Interestingly it doesn’t list any bug fixes at all, and the list of known issues is still quite long. Intel’s goal for this driver is to provide Game-On support for two games: AEW: Fight Forever, Layers of Fear. More importantly, the driver brings a huge performance boost to one of the very popular DirectX11 games: Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
As mentioned this game is quite old and many AC games have been released since then. Intel Arc graphics cards are known to be optimized for the latest APIs such as DirectX12 or Vulkan, and the company has been very blunt in stating that Arc GPUs may not be the best choice for games using older APIs. Yet Intel is putting a lot of effort into optimizing graphics cards for some of the most popular games in recent history, including the AC series.
Intel GPU driver update
Assassin’s Creed Unity (DX11)
Up to 271% uplift at 1080p with Very High settingsUp to 313% uplift at 1440p with High settingsF1 22 (DX12)
Up to 36% uplift at 1080p with High settingsUp to 20% uplift at 1440p with High settingsUp to 10% uplift at 1080p with Ultra High settings and all Ray Tracing settings on
Deathloop (DX12)
Up to 10% uplift at 1080p with Ultra settingsUp to 8% uplift at 1440p with Very High settings
The driver also brings small improvements to F1 22 and Deathloop, both of which are DX12 titles, with an estimated 8% to 36% boost depending on the resolution. These results were achieved on a Core i9-13900K system paired with an Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition. These gains are compared to the previous WHQL version (4502).
