Intel is not ready for Starfield early launch
Gamers with Arc graphics and early access to Starfield, one of the most anticipated games this month, will be forced to wait until next week. The company does not have a Starfield optimized GPU driver ready yet with one planned for next week.
Starfield is set to launch next week, but some Premium owners have already got early access to the game. There is a group of such gamers running Intel ARC GPUs that have encountered several issues that prevent them from playing the game smoothly, or playing it at all. They reported that the game either fails to start, or takes a long time to load. Moreover, the game executable consumes a lot of memory while running in the background, up to 30GB in some cases. Even when the game finally starts, it may crash within minutes, according to TechPowerUP.
We are aware of issues with @StarfieldGame on Intel Arc graphics. We are working to improve the experience for the game's general release next week.
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 31, 2023
The good news is that Intel is aware of these problems and has announced on Twitter(X) that it is working on a fix. The bad news is that the fix will not be available until next week when the game officially releases. It certainly seems that Intel did not have access to the early build of the game that was sent to the media last week, which is rather unusual for such a big company.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, had already released a game-optimized driver for Starfield ten days ago. AMD, which sponsors the game, also released a driver this week. Hopefully, by September 6th, when Starfield launches for everyone, Intel will have its driver ready and the game will run smoothly on all platforms.
Source: Intel via TechPowerUP
