Month: August 2023

What I played on my summer vacation

Don’t let Baldur’s Gate obscure these inventive, smaller recent releases.

What I played on my summer vacation

Enlarge (credit: Sad Owl Studios)

Careful Ars readers may have noticed that my byline was absent from the site for a large portion of July and August (if you missed me, please leave a comment so my editors will know how much. If you didn't notice... do not leave a comment). That's because I was using a large hunk of saved-up vacation time to tour around Europe from a "home base" in beautiful Switzerland, where I've been living and working for the summer.

The timing of that trip meant I didn't have access to my usual PC gaming rig, consoles, or reliable Internet for the anticipated launch of Baldur's Gate III, on which I'm now playing catch up. It also means I needed some more bite-sized games that could be played during stolen moments on trains and in hotels during vacation travel downtime.

Luckily, a few recent indie releases on the Steam Deck were happy to fill in those bits of time. Here are a few of the games I found most interesting on my European travels.

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Anzeige: Darum kauft diese Dachbox gerade jeder

Thule gilt als Koryphäe bei Dachboxen, wird aber nicht von jedem fürs Auto gekauft. Stattdessen greifen gerade alle zu Rotenbach. Warum? (Auto, Amazon)

Thule gilt als Koryphäe bei Dachboxen, wird aber nicht von jedem fürs Auto gekauft. Stattdessen greifen gerade alle zu Rotenbach. Warum? (Auto, Amazon)

Intel Arc: Umfangreiches Update zu Arc-GPUs mit neuem Feature

Neue Treiber für die Grafikkarten gibt es regelmäßig. Intel hat eine Übersicht gegeben, was das über die Zeit gebracht hat. Außerdem gibt es ein neues Analysetool. (Intel Arc, Intel)

Neue Treiber für die Grafikkarten gibt es regelmäßig. Intel hat eine Übersicht gegeben, was das über die Zeit gebracht hat. Außerdem gibt es ein neues Analysetool. (Intel Arc, Intel)

New Intel GPU drivers help address one of Arc’s biggest remaining weak points

Driver updates (and so-so upgrades from Nvidia and AMD) keep Arc in the game.

Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago.

Enlarge / Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago. (credit: Intel)

When they launched last fall, Intel's drivers for its Arc dedicated graphics cards were in rough shape. The company's messaging at the time—and for months beforehand—was something along the lines of, "We're aware, and we're working on it."

I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of "we'll fix it in post" promises; you should buy products based on what they do now and not what the manufacturer promises they will one day be able to do, especially for something like consumer graphics cards where there are plenty of alternatives. But credit where it's due, Intel has put quite a bit of work into improving its drivers in the year or so since the first Arc cards launched.

Today the company has rounded up a collection of improvements made to its DirectX 11 drivers since launch, with a collection of games that run about 19 percent faster on average than they did last October. Though Arc's performance in modern DirectX 12 and Vulkan games has always been good for the price, older APIs like DirectX 9 and 11 were particular weak points of Arc's when compared to competing cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and 3060 series and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and 6600 series.

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