Here are the games that don’t work on Intel Alder Lake, but there is a workaround
Anthem, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, For Honor, Mortal Kombat, and Madden 22 all fall foul of DRM issues with Intel’s 12th Gen.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Intel Alder Lake processors are out now, and they’re seriously speedy in games as you’ll find out in ourCore i9 12900K reviewandCore i5 12600K review. Though, there are a few games that the exact opposite is true—where DRM, or Digital Rights Management, prevent the processor from booting the game whatsoever.
It’s an issue we were made aware of in the run-up to Intel’s 12th Gen release, and one that I ran into during testing with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Intel gave me the following response: “We are aware of an issue with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and we are working with the game publisher on a fix.”
Today, there’s a complete list of games that arecurrently incompatible with Intel Alder Lake(nice spot,Andreas Schilling), but which ones work and which don’t will depend on whether you haveWindows 11or Windows 10 installed on your PC.
Incompatible games (Windows 11)
Incompatible games (Windows 10)
The games in bold, Intel states, are set to receive a patch with the Windows 11 update sometime mid-November, which should put this issue to rest. For the remaining games, Intel says it is working with the developers on a fix.
By the looks of it, too, there’s all the more reason to run Alder Lake on Windows 11 over Windows 10. Not only will you net the best performance out of your chip, but you won’t have to worry about quite so much incompatibility with DRM software. That does, however, mean using an OS that we’re still a little on the fence about in Windows 11.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Scroll Lock Workaround
Intel does mention a workaround, however, and it’s partially to do with Intel Alder Lake’s brand new Efficient Cores (E-Cores).
According to Intel, DRM software may wrongly assume these E-Cores are an entirely different system to the other CPU cores included in Alder Lake, the Performance Cores (P-Cores). Thus, preventing the game from running successfully.
So, one way to get around that would be to disable your E-Cores. Now that’s not great, as that’s one reason why Alder Lake processors are so impressive, but when need’s must.
It’s possible to do so by enablingLegacy Game Compatibility Mode, which is a fairly simple process:
That should do it, and while not the ideal fix we’re hoping for, it does at least mean these games aren’t entirely off the cards with your brand new Alder Lake-powered PC.
Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer’s top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you’ll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D just hit 6.9 GHz and thousands of in-game fps with an overclock and it barely even broke a sweat
AMD finally beats Intel in server revenue, but surprise surprise, Nvidia’s still miles ahead
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
