Intel graphics don’t get much screen time against the weight of AMD and Nvidia, but say what you want about Arc GPUs, they just keep on improving. This is clear enough from the latest driver, the release notes for which claim some significant performance improvements in certain games.
The release notes for WHQL driver 32.0.101.9150 (PDF warning) claim a whopping 31% average fps uplift in Resident Evil Requiem at 1080p on medium settings for Core Ultra 2 (Lunar Lake) integrated Arc GPUs. That drops just a couple of per cent to 29% when on high settings.
There are other big boosts too: 18% for Assassin’s Creed Shadows at 1080p, high settings, and 11% for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at 1080p on high, plus some more smaller boosts.
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Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) integrated GPUs get a more moderate boost of 5% for F1 25 at 1080p on medium settings. And Arc B-series graphics cards get a 6% boost in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Monster Hunter Rise, both at 1440p on high settings.
Nothing quite as big as the uplift Lunar Lake supposedly sees, but still enough to show that there’s a ‘fine wine’ element across the Arc stack. Although based on our experience here at PC Gamer, it’s less of a case of ‘good to great’ and more ‘temperamental to reliable’.
When our Dave reviewed the Intel Arc B580, he concluded that it’s a great budget GPU when it works, but there are games where it doesn’t perform well and some where it doesn’t work at all. Things have improved since then, but Intel GPUs are still more inconsistent than Nvidia and AMD ones.
Both Intel Lunar Lake (eg, Arc 140V) and more recent Panther Lake (eg, Arc B390) are very efficient GPUs that make for some snappy laptops—especially the latter. But there’s always a risk of inconsistency in games, and giant performance improvements from driver updates testify to this.
Still, the continued improvement is great to see, even for older Arc GPUs. Especially considering Intel graphics cards are some of the cheapest modern ones and have managed to stave off a lot of the impact of the global memory shortage. As you can see from the chart above, the cheapest Arc B570 and Arc B580 cards have stayed relatively stable in price, and very cheap for the current market.
At any rate, whether you’re rocking a discrete Intel GPU or some integrated Arc graphics, you might want to check out your performance in some of those games after an update. You can download the latest driver here.
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