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Intel Core i-12000: Alder Lake copy protection makes games crash

The Intel Alder Lake CPUs of the Core i-12000 series have just been launched and are supposed to offer gamers an enormous performance advantage. It’s just stupid when titles like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla constantly crash due to the copy protection mechanisms like Denuvo – first gamers report problems with the new processors.

Intel Alder Lake-S with problems

Since November 04, the new Intel Alder Lake-S CPUs are officially available and are supposed to provide a huge increase in gaming performance. However, there are severe problems in the form of crashes and other errors in various games. Intel reports this on its own support website.

The problem lies in the copy protection measures of the game manufacturers for digital rights management (DRM). Especially the software from Denuvo is said to be strongly affected.

Titles from various manufacturers are said to be affected, including Ubisoft’s open-world games such as Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla or Far Cry: Primal, EA games such as Anthem or Need for Speed – Hot Pursuit Remastered, or else Mortal Kombat 11 from Warner Bros.

Intel published the complete list on its own support page, which is updated weekly and already includes around 50 games that are currently affected by the DRM issues of the Intel Core i-12000 CPU series.

Denuvo is working on patches with Alder Lake support

Affected titles crash without any apparent error message. In addition, significantly more games are affected under Windows 10 than under the successor Windows 11. However, Denuvo has already identified the error: The hybrid computing of Alder Lake-S, which is incorrectly recognized, is to blame.

The problem apparently lies in the fact that the proprietary copy protection incorrectly recognizes the combination of performance cores and efficiency cores of the Intel Core i-12000 CPUs and therefore terminates the running game. In most cases, this happens directly when starting a title, but sometimes also after several hours in-game.

Both Intel and Denuvo are working with the development studios and publishers of all affected titles to provide appropriate patches as soon as possible. Corresponding updates should be offered as early as mid-November 2021, with further fixes to follow over the coming months.

Intel Alder Lake-S: Core i9-12900K

Workaround: Make games run on Alder Lake-S

However, Intel also offers a workaround to make problematic games run on Alder Lake-S. The Legacy Game Compatibility Mode is used here, which can be activated in the motherboard BIOS after booting the computer.

If you press the scroll key (“Scroll Lock”) before the game starts with an activated Legacy Game Compatibility Mode, the efficiency cores are temporarily disabled. This way, DRM systems can’t perceive them as secondary systems, which should prevent the error from occurring again. Pressing the scroll key again wakes up the cores so that the full PC performance is available again.

Simon Lüthje

I am co-founder of this blog and am very interested in everything that has to do with technology, but I also like to play games. I was born in Hamburg, but now I live in Bad Segeberg.

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