Intel's new Starfield GPU driver hotfix still has a host of problems

pcgamer.com:

There was always going to be a certain amount of jank when Starfield launched. It is, after all PC gaming in 2023 and practically every big launch has to have more than its fair share of bugs, crashes, or GPU blowouts. But as a Bethesda game there was always going to be more to it than that. And, while it's certainly not bug-free on other graphics cards, it seems that Intel's Arc GPUs are suffering more than most.

And that looks to be true even after the latest Intel graphics driver release. It has, however, still fixed «several Starfield game instability and visual artifacts» in this latest release, but the release notes (.pdf warning) point to some pretty significant problems still to be ironed out.

Intel has acknowledged this, and notes that «efforts in progress to further improve overall gaming experience of Starfield for Intel Arc users in future driver updates.» We have reached out to Intel to see if it has any kind of time frame on a further hotfix, but it has said on Twitter/X that it is expecting another drop this week.

In order to facilitate the big fix for this release, namely shortening the load times of the game, Intel has increased the size of the driver package to «significantly reduce» load duration.

In terms of the key fixes for this driver, 31.0.101.4672, you can expect fixes for the following issues:

But there are still a host of known Starfield issues its driver team is working through hopefully for an imminent update.

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