Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a nasty bug that crashes games

Date:
Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:53:29 +0000

Description:
This is an unpleasant affair for some gamers with Intel GPUs, but the good news is a fix is inbound.

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Windows 11 and 10 users have been hit by a bug that affects those with Intel GPUs and causes games (or any software using DirectX or Direct3D) to run into errors and crashes.

Neowin reports that Microsoft has now confirmed that the cumulative updates for November 2022 (KB5019980/KB5019961 for Windows 11, and KB5019959 for Windows 10 ) caused this issue. To be clear, this affects PCs running on integrated graphics from an Intel CPU - not anyone using one of Intel's dedicated Arc graphics cards .

So, if youve been encountering a DLL error (apphelp.dll to be precise) that has been messing with your PC, now you know the reason but the important thing to note here is that the bug is only affecting older Intel graphics driver versions.

Microsoft tells us that the problem pertains to Intel driver versions 26.20.100.7463 up to 30.0.101.1190, and that: This issue might happen intermittently and affects apps which use DirectX or Direct3D to render part or all of their content.

The software giant promises us that its working on a solution right now, and we should get an update on when itll be inbound soon. Analysis: Newer
drivers, no problems

At least the bug is only intermittent according to Microsoft, which means
that it may not necessarily occur that much even if you are running one of
the mentioned Intel graphics driver versions. Of course, those are older drivers, so you really should have updated to a newer incarnation by now anyway.

Its important to keep drivers at least relatively up-to-date, because otherwise you may miss out on important security fixes. As time rolls on, vulnerabilities in software and drivers are inevitably found and nefarious types may try to exploit them. So tech companies fix drivers and apps as they go along, which is why its always a good idea to run the very latest version.

GPU drivers can be a little bit of a different story in some respects, as for example, performance levels could potentially drop in your favorite PC games with any given new driver release (this shouldnt happen, but it does occasionally, particularly with older graphics cards). So while gamers dont always keep their driver on the latest version, as long as theyre running something pretty recent, they should be covered just fine.

In the case of this bug, were talking about Intel driver versions that are at least a year old (or much further back), and at that point, its definitely time that folks should be looking to move on to a newer driver. This just
goes to show that old drivers arent just a security risk, but they are more likely to run into bugs, too.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-admits-windows-11-has-a-nasty-bug-tha t-crashes-games


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