How is Intel Arc GPU game compatibility now? Extensive testing reveals a pleasant surprise

Been wondering how Intel Arc GPUs are faring these days in terms of game compatibility? Well, you're in good company, as Hardware Unboxed on YouTube certainly has, and they've tested every game they own with an Arc A770 graphics card, in fact.

So, how did this experiment (flagged up by VideoCardz) go? The good news is that Intel's Alchemist flagship GPU managed to run the vast majority of PC games in Hardware Unboxed's library (using that latest graphics driver, of course).

This was an extensive test of 250 games, and only 2% of them failed to work at all, while a further 5% weren't playable (due to performance issues or other wonkiness). 93% were found to be playable, which means running with at least 40 frames per second and no glitches or artefacts and the like.

That shows how far Intel Arc has come, because back in the early days for these graphics cards, there were a lot of problems.

New driver versions quickly fixed broken games, though, and successive drivers have fired up huge performance boosts for many titles, as we've seen repeatedly through the timeline of Arc driver releases. In fact, some of those performance uplifts have been massive (admittedly because FPS was really poor in the first place, but still).

All this bodes well for Battlemage and overall compatibility and performance levels, although we're still hearing that Arc's 2nd-gen is sadly not going to be here for some time - early 2025 by all acounts. And it'll be lower-tier GPUs only, but that's not a bad thing, we want some good budget desktop GPUs (not to mention the impact of Xe2 integrated graphics, of course, for laptops and handhelds).