Bilawal Bashir 
Intel has pushed out three driver updates for its GPUs in the past week for a card Bethesda claims is now unsuitable for Starfield.
The Intel Arc-A series of cards are not having a good time with Bethesda Game Studios’ popular RPG, Starfield. The manufacturer has released three drivers to address numerous issues customers are facing with Starfield. Its latest was meant to fix multiple graphics and stability issues plaguing the game. One graphical glitch resulted in missing eyebrows on characters in the game, which was a hilarious but frustrating experience for Intel users.
A Bethesda support agent, on the other hand, says Intel’s cards are simply below the minimum requirements for Starfield. In fact, they go so far as to suggest gamers should upgrade to Nvidia or AMD GPUs instead, pouring salt in the wounds.
Will Starfield run on Intel GPUs?
Starfield experiences significant performance issues on Intel graphic cards. Even after patch number three, the game has significant problems.
The patch notes for the latest driver, version 31.0.101.4676 Non-WHQL, list some major unresolved issues. Sporadic game instability in certain areas, dynamic resolution scaling corrupting the game, incorrect texture quality on some objects, and textures flickering during gameplay are all happening. The good news is that Intel is actively working on making things right for Arc users. The company has released three patches in under a week since Starfield’s release.
Other issues like the rendering of glass surfaces and objects have been fixed. The infamous missing eyebrow issue is also gone with the latest patch. The lack of drivers resulted in players facing numerous issues, including the inability to launch the game but Bethesda is pointing the figure at the hardware rather than the game itself.
Are Intel Arc A770 cards not supported?
According to a Bethesda representative, the Intel Arc A770 GPU does not meet Starfield’s minimum requirements. There is no official announcement from Bethesda Game Studios about this issue.
“I see that you have an Intel(R) Arc(™) A770 graphics card. This does not meet the minimum requirements of an AMD Radeon RX 5700, or NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti,” the customer service representative stated.
The Intel Arc A770 and Arc A750 are both newer cards compared to the RX 5700, and especially the GTX 1070 Ti, a 2017 GPU. In terms of performance, the Intel Arc A770 is comparable with other mid-range cards from the competition including the AMD RX 6600 XT and NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphic cards. The cards both meet the minimum required specs for Starfield, so it’s unclear what the trouble might be.
A customer support representative doesn’t represent the views of a whole company but Starfield’s struggles on PC have been a touchy subject, which included director Todd Howard saying that the game was optimized well for PC, but players just need to upgrade their hardware. It’s possible this statement was made in error but Intel Arc GPU owners are waiting for the game to be fully functional.
