At long last Intel gives Arc owners some Starfield loving, delivering up to 149% higher frame rates and fixing texture corruption

pcgamer.com:

It's been over a month since Starfield was launched around the globe but Intel has finally addressed performance issues and a handful of bugs with a new set of drivers for its Arc graphics card range.

New GPU driver releases aren't typically hold-the-front-page news items, but Intel Arc owners have been facing some pretty annoying issues in Starfield since the game came out at the start of September. The most obvious problem being the mediocre performance, even at low resolutions, but given that even the best GPUs were struggling, it wasn't a surprise.

I say mediocre, but what I really mean is totally unplayable. I'm not talking about low fps or the odd stutter, it just flat out refused to work. Round one of the patches came pretty quickly, offering fixes for the long load times and general instability, but in round two, nothing new came to the table. Intel was happy to point out that a good number of problems were 'known' but offered nothing to placate what few Arc fans it has.

Then early this week, and just a mere month after the game was launched all around the world, Intel released another set of drivers with some genuine Starfield improvements. Well, claims of improvements, at the very least. If you're using Ultra settings at 1080p, you might get up to 117% better frame rates or 149% more if you're running at 1440p on High details.

Intel used an Arc A750 paired with a Core i9 13900K to check these gains, though I'm not sure how many A750 owners will have that kind of CPU in their gaming PCs. It's also worth noting that while 149% sounds like a massive boost, if you were already plodding along at 30 fps, the new drivers would only hike that up to 45 fps at best.

The patch notes (.pdf warning) highlight the following