Yesterday we witnessed the release of the Intel Arc B570, which received a fairly positive reception. It feels as if it may fall out of favor compared to its old sibling, the B580, but the budget GPU delivers solid performance for 1080p gaming without breaking the bank. The first thing that caught our attention was a Black Ops 6 performance boost, though it doesn’t directly affect the new Battlemage GPUs.

However, if you’re running one of Intel’s new ‘Core Ultra Series 2’ processors, including desktop chips like the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K and budget Core Ultra 5 245K, there is a performance boost to enjoy. Series 2 mobile (laptop) processors should also be affected. As such, we expect this only affects integrated graphics performance. As for the dGPUs, there are notable fixes for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle & Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Intel Arc graphics driver January 16th patch notes

You can read the full patch notes here, which include a list of known issues. Below, we’ve summarized some of the key highlights and most recently fixed issues for driver Version 32.0.101.6458 WHQL and 32.0.101.6257 WHQL.

Highlights

• Launch driver for Intel® Arc™ B570 Graphics (codename Battlemage)
• Launch driver for Intel® Core™ Ultra Series 2 Mobile Processors (codename Arrow Lake-H)

Gaming highlights

• Game performance improvements on Intel Core Ultra series 2 versus Intel 31.0.101.6449 software driver for:
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (DX12)
    • Up to 6.8% average FPS uplift at 1080p with Basic settings

Fixed issues

• Intel Arc Battlemage
  • Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (VK) may exhibit inconsistent performance and GPU memory usage during gameplay
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12) may experience intermittent application crashes and corruption in the game menu with XeSS enabled

Even though the Black Ops 6 performance boost doesn’t relate to the new Battlemage cards, it’s nice to see some optimizations for the title on Intel hardware – Arc GPUs failed to impress at launch compared to AMD and Nvidia equivalents. The inconsistent performance and GPU memory usage fix for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (on the Vulkan API) is also a notable improvement, especially as the game is known to be VRAM-hungry.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.