There is no a driver update for the Arc GPU at the end of April as Intel promised

Intel launched the Arc series of discrete graphics cards on March 30. The graphics card has been released for more than a month so far, but notebook products equipped with this graphics card are still quite rare, and the driver update that Intel had promised to release at the end of April has not yet been seen.

Lisa Pearce, director of graphics software engineering at Intel, wrote in an article shared on the community blog at the end of April that they will add an option to the driver’s user interface that allows users to turn on or off optimization settings for benchmarks. After opening, all tests of 3DMark will be optimized, and the performance can be improved by 15%, but so far, this driver update Intel has not released.

At present, Intel’s driver for the Arc graphics card was launched on April 8, and the version number is 30.0.101.1330. The suffix of the latest GPU driver is 1660, and the suffix of the beta version is 1934. At present, Intel has not integrated Arc discrete graphics and their core graphics drivers into one driver package, which means that notebooks using Arc discrete graphics use completely different drivers for their discrete graphics and integrated graphics.

Of course, laptops equipped with Arc’s independent graphics are not yet available in all regions of the world. This behavior is also a blow to consumers’ confidence in Intel’s discrete graphics. In fact, Intel’s graphics card driver update is really slow compared to AMD and NVIDIA. They even forgot to release the integrated graphics driver when the Rocket Lake processor was released.