Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Update your PC: Intel has fixed Alder Lake’s biggest gaming problem

By

Intel and digital rights management (DRM) service Denuvo have fixed one of the largest issues plaguing the 12th-gen Alder Lake platform. At launch, Intel revealed over 90 games that wouldn’t work with its most recent processors. A month after launch, the list has shrunk to only three.

A recent Windows Update solved the issue for the majority of titles. We checked the list about a week ago, and it was still full. Now, there are only three titles that have issues on Windows 11 and Windows 10 — Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Fernbus Simulator, and Madden NFL 22. To apply the fix, download and install the most recent Windows Update.

Intel Core i9-12900K between fingers.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Shortly after launch, Intel revealed that a number of games refused to work with its 12th-gen Alder Lake processors. The problem came down to how DRM services handled the different types of cores in Alder Lake processors.

Recommended Videos

Instead of a single CPU, the DRM would recognize the performance (P) cores and efficient (E) cores as separate computers. That would throw up a red flag to the DRM that the game wasn’t legitimate, and it would cause the game to either crash or refuse to load. Some titles only had issues on Windows 10, others only on Windows 11, but most had issues on both. The three games still without fixes fall into the last bucket.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

Gigabyte and MSI released tools to bypass the issue originally. These special BIOS versions included an option to disable the E-cores. Intel also provided a scroll lock workaround, which can dynamically disable E-cores when running games. The workaround is still an option for the three games currently without fixes.

Most of the games in question used DRM service Denuvo, including a long list of titles from Ubisoft, EA, and Sega. This isn’t the first time Denuvo has caused issues with PC games. In July, the platform caused major stuttering issues in Resident Evil Village, which was only discovered as the culprit after players found out that the cracked version — with the DRM removed and meant for pirating — ran better than the official release.

We ran into issues with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in our Intel Core i9-12900K review. The game would crash immediately after starting, and the few times we were able to get in, performance would be lower than expected. If you encounter titles with major performance issues on 12th-gen Alder Lake, and you have the most recent updates installed, we recommend notifying Intel of the problem.

Hopefully. this gaming bug with Alder Lake is a hiccup and not an ongoing problem. As more games are released with different DRM services, it’s possible that they’ll get tripped up by Alder Lake’s hybrid architecture.

For the final three games, we’re not sure when Intel expects a fix. The company originally said it expected fixes for most games by mid-November, but the list wasn’t updated until the beginning of December. The three remaining games didn’t have a patch time frame originally, and they still don’t. Hopefully, Intel will have fixes out before the end of the year.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
It’s time to stop ignoring the CPU in your gaming PC
A hand holding an AMD Ryzen CPU.

There's one thing that will strike fear into the heart of any PC gamer: a CPU bottleneck. It's unimaginable that you wouldn't get the full power of your GPU when playing games, which is often the most expensive component in your rig. And although knowledge of what CPU bottlenecks are and how to avoid them is common, we're in a new era of bottlenecks in 2024.

It's time to reexamine the role your CPU plays in your gaming PC, not only so that you can get the most performance out of your rig but also to understand why the processor has left the gaming conversation over the last few years. It's easy to focus all of your attention on a big graphics card, but ignore your CPU and you'll pay a performance price.
The common knowledge

Read more
The simple reasons your PC games don’t play as well as they should
The HP Omen 40L desktop sitting on a coffee table.

Whether you have the best gaming desktop money can buy or a budget-oriented PC, the whole point of it all is to be able to play your favorite games and make them look nice and run great. Not every gamer cares about visuals, but performance matters, and getting your money's worth out of your PC is important, too.

If a PC performs poorly in games, many of us immediately assume that the hardware is to blame. Sure, that can often be the case, but before you start looking into ways to upgrade your computer, try out these solutions that might solve your problem and let you get back to high-quality gaming.
PC settings
Whether you're dealing with poor performance, such as stuttering and low frames per second (fps), or you're simply unhappy with how your games look, the root of the problem might lie in the settings of your PC -- and as such, it could be an easy fix.

Read more
What to do if your Intel CPU keeps crashing
Pins on Core i9-12900K.

Despite being among the best processors you can buy, some high-end Intel CPUs have faced a wave of instability over the past few months. Intel is investigating the problem, but the company and its motherboard partners have already worked toward some temporary fixes to improve stability on high-end Intel CPUs -- even if it comes at a performance cost.

Before getting into the fixes, keep in mind that they are temporary. Intel will release a statement on the instability soon, likely with more direct guidance on what affected users should do. In addition, the scope of the problem isn't clear -- if you're not experiencing issues, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
Who's affected

Read more