Intel says it’s rolling out laptop GPU drivers with 10% to 25% better performance

Laptops with Core Ultra 200V chips CPUs Arc 130V or 140V GPUs should benefit.

Intel's oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips—codenamed Lunar Lake—will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They're Intel's only processors with memory integrated onto the CPU package; the only ones with a neural processing unit that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ performance requirements; and the only ones with Intel's best-performing integrated GPUs, the Intel Arc 130V and 140V.

Today, Intel announced some updates to its graphics driver that specifically benefit those integrated GPUs, welcome news for anyone who bought one and is trying to get by with it as an entry-level gaming system. Intel says that version 32.0.101.6734 of its graphics driver can speed up average frame rates in some games by around 10 percent, and can speed up "1 percent low FPS" (that is, for any given frames per second measurement, whatever your frame rate is the slowest 1 percent of the time) by as much as 25 percent. This should, in theory, make games run better in general and ease some of the stuttering you notice when your game's performance dips down to that 1 percent level.

Intel's performance comparisons were made using an MSI Claw 7 AI+ using an Arc 140V GPU, and they compare the performance of driver version 32.0.101.6732 (released April 2) to version 32.0.101.6734 (released April 8). The two additional driver packages Intel has released since then will contain the improvements, too.

Intel says these drivers primarily help performance when the chip is running "at or under the common default power level of 17 W," which could explain why the company isn't advertising similar performance gains for the Intel Arc B580 or B570, its desktop GPUs built using the same graphics architecture. Dedicated desktop GPUs obviously have a bigger power budget than a small integrated GPU that's sharing space and power with the CPU cores and everything else that's included in a modern CPU package, so the optimizations in the new driver may not matter as much.

Intel's latest graphics drivers are available for all Arc A- and B-series desktop and mobile GPUs, as well as the integrated Iris Xe, Arc, and UHD Graphics GPUs included in 11th-generation Core processors and newer. Anyone should be able to install and use the generic drivers from Intel's site, but laptop users in particular may notice instability or wake/sleep issues compared to the driver that your computer manufacturer has tested and validated. Intel says computer manufacturers will release validated drivers with the performance improvements "over the coming months."

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