October 27, the day of Intel Innovation, is fast approaching and with it should come the official reveal event for Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake processors. While team blue’s 12th generation chips will likely rank among the best gaming CPUs when they’re finally released, the company has warned that its new microarchitecture’s hybrid core design could be incompatible with some DRM software like Denuvo.
In an Alder Lake developer guide, as highlighted by Gamer’s Gospel, Intel advises developers to “design [their] software with hybrid architectures (such as Alder Lake) in mind.” It elaborates further on potential incompatibilities with DRM by suggesting affected parties contact their provider and confirm whether its digital rights management solution supports hybrid architectures.
“Intel is working with leading DRM providers such as Denuvo to make sure their solutions support new platforms”, the company states in the developer guide. While it’s good to see Intel being transparent about this potential issue, the extent of this potential incompatibility and how quickly it can be addressed post-launch remains to be seen.
Issues and incompatibilities with new items of software or hardware are somewhat expected, but leaked benchmarks of the flagship Alder Lake gaming CPU, the Intel Core i9-12900K, indicate its level of performance might warrant bearing with any potential teething problems. In both gaming and productivity tests, the team blue chip leaves the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in the dust, with the Intel Core i7-12700K also delivering a strong single-threaded showing.
Intel’s CEO has recently boasted that Alder Lake will snatch the crown from AMD, but this victory could be short lived as team red prepares to launch its Zen 4 gaming CPUs next year. Worse still, team blue has lost ground to AMD in terms of gaming PC market share, and so Alder Lake needs to act as a strong comeback for the company.