What you need to know
- Intel has pushed out a second Starfield-focused driver update for its Arc graphics cards.
- Among the improvements are that your characters will now have proper eyebrows.
- There's still a sizeable list of known issues, though, and stability is still an issue.
Starfield continues to be a roller coaster ride for those of us who use Intel Arc graphics cards in our PCs, though there's a new driver update that does at least fix some more issues. But not all of them.
While Todd Howard thinks you should just upgrade your PC if Starfield isn't playing well for you, the issues with Intel graphics aren't related to just being underpowered. Despite what a hilarious interaction with the online support team may indicate (pro-tip, the Intel Arc A770 very much outperforms the GTX 1070 Ti.)
It's abundantly clear that prior to launch Intel users, however small in number they may be, weren't a focus, but Intel's own boffins are working hard to try and make it better for us. The new driver does that in places, but is still a way off being what I'd call very playable. Here's the quick list of fixes for Starfield:
- Starfield (DX12) improved stability in different areas of the game.
- Starfield (DX12) may incorrectly render glass surfaces and objects.
- Starfield (DX12) may exhibit missing eyebrows on characters
However, this list of still known issues is a bit larger:
- Starfield (DX12) may experience sporadic instability in some areas of the game.
- Starfield (DX12) may exhibit corruption when using Dynamic Resolution Scaling. A workaround is to change the Render Resolution Scale slider value.
- Starfield (DX12) may exhibit low texture details on certain objects in the game.
- Starfield (DX12) may exhibit texture flickering on light sources during gameplay
I'm using an Intel Arc A770 in my gaming PC, and I still haven't been able to progress beyond the first 15 minutes of the game. Despite the updated drivers, I've seen crashes galore, initially any time I changed a graphics setting the game would just freak out and then crash to desktop. The latest driver I can't even get outside the ship in the initial part of the game it seems without a crash.
I'm happy that Intel is working overtime to fix this game for its users, but as I've written recently, I'm not remotely thrilled by the quality control overall in PC gaming of late. The cynical side of me puts this whole AMD deal at the heart of it, especially since even folks on NVIDIA graphics have seen their own share of issues.
I'll keep playing around and if I can figure out something stable enough to report back on, I'll update this post. But right now, the Xbox Series X is looking more attractive. But hey, we have eyebrows now, at least.
