New Intel driver gives Starfield its eyebrows back

Starfield - the Adoring Fan NPC, with his trademark mustard-yellow mohawk

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

This has to be one of the weirdest bugs I've seen squashed in recent driver release notes: some players with Intel Arc graphics may have noticed that characters in Starfield had their eyebrows blown off their face when using previous driver versions. The latest driver, version 31.0.101.4676, brings them back.

Intel has been rushing to get Starfield running smoothly on Arc graphics cards this past week, including a hotfix earlier in the week just before the game's official release date and now this most recent package.

Starfield (DX12) improved stability in different areas of the game.
Starfield (DX12) may incorrectly render glass surfaces and objects.
Starfield (DX12) may exhibit missing eyebrows on characters.

There are a few notable absences from the 'fixed' list, which are still pending solutions on Intel's end. Other outstanding issues remain the same as with the previous driver hotfix for Starfield, and include:

Starfield (DX12) may experience sporadic instability in some areas of the game.
Starfield (DX12) may exhibit corruption when using Dynamic Resolution Scaling. A workaround is to change the Render Resolution Scale slider value.
Starfield (DX12) may exhibit low texture details on certain objects in the game.
Starfield (DX12) may exhibit texture flickering on light sources during gameplay.

Starfield has proven a nuisance for Intel's graphics in more ways than one. Bethesda customer support told one customer looking for advice after frequent crashes that their Intel Arc A770 graphics card doesn't meet the minimum requirements for the game (via Videocardz). That's despite Starfield's minimum requirements listed as an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, which the higher-end Arc A770 should realistically meet just fine in a DX12 game such as this.

This might be a case of customer support sticking to the prescribed minimum requirements, which simply don't consider Intel's offerings, as a relative newcomer to the graphics card market. Or it just doesn't see much point appealing to the small share of the playerbase likely using Intel hardware. Either way, it looks like Intel's got its work cut out for it to get Starfield's performance up to par.

Bethesda's Todd Howard has a solution to funky Starfield performance, anyways: "upgrade your PC." Thanks, Todd.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.