Another month, another responsible status report on young Intel GPU drivers for Arc series graphics cards from PCWorld contributor Keith May. In February, a new game, the attractive but temperamental Forspoken, will appear in the review, as well as an unexpected frame rate boost for the main game. Also, some exciting news that happened just hours after Keith’s video was posted: Intel is dropping the price of the Arc A750 to $249!
Compared to last month’s driver release, the Arc A770 driver hasn’t changed much for most of our tested games. In GTA V, Counter-Strike GO, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Troy, Borderlands 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077, the results of the three-month test were in line with (or slightly behind) the two-month test. This is a particular bummer for Cyberpunk, which has just received a DLSS boost on the latest Nvidia cards.
There was one standout: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Whatever special sauce Intel put into the new driver shows roughly a 5-10 percent improvement across the board, while 1 percent lows saw a notable jump to 51fps per second. at 1080p and 36fps at 1440, that’s not bad performance for such a graphics-intensive new game. The gain over the launch of Arc is even more impressive.
Forspoken is a new game from Square Enix dedicated to magical hand-to-hand combat. It looks great… if you have the opportunity to run its detailed graphics and amazing effects. Forspoken has already earned a reputation as a resource hog even on high-end gaming PCs, and the Arc A770 is not a high-end card. But, to Intel’s credit, the first release of the driver managed to raise the 1% minimum by a solid ten percent, even if it didn’t affect the average FPS much. At 1080p the game runs at over 60fps on high settings – not bad!
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