Intel has admitted a graphics driver bug that can cause severe lagging of Chromium-based web browsers on some of the systems that use the company’s 12th Generation Core Alder Lake processors with UHD Graphics 770 integrated GPU. The blue giant recommends updating software, changing settings, or switching to an SSD to resolve the issue.
“Recent Intel UHD Graphics 770 drivers for 12th Gen Intel Core Processors cause Edge and Chrome browsers to lag severely,” Intel’s description of the bug reads (opens in new tab) (via momomo_us (opens in new tab)). “The browsers behave like they are semi-frozen. Click response delay is 2 seconds, and scrolling is severely delayed and choppy. The issue can be replicated by opening a lot of tabs at once or scrolling and clicking around and using a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD).”
To solve the issue, Intel recommends updating the browser (Edge or Chrome) and Windows to the latest version and clean installing the latest Intel Graphics drivers. In addition, disabling hardware acceleration in the browser and switching from a mechanical hard drive to a solid-state drive could help.
Judging by Intel’s description, it looks like the company’s graphics driver somehow affects how hardware-accelerated graphics rendering works with Chromium and causes unnecessary swapping of RAM contents to the primary storage device (which might be a result of poor memory management).
While the bug certainly ruins the user experience, it does not seem to cause any damage to hardware or data/OS integrity. Of course, when bugs like these emerge, you question Intel’s ability to design sophisticated GPU drivers, a question that Intel would undoubtedly like to avoid ahead of its discrete desktop GPU launch in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the good news is that this bug seems to affect some of the systems with particular configurations of hardware (it looks like, in this case, we are talking only about iGPU-enabled machines) and software.