Well, here’s a little note in another upbeat tone of Intel 12th Generation Old Lake CPU: the new chips seem to be handling games that use Denuvo DRM. Not all of them, fortunately, but Intel listed more than 50 games may experience compatibility issues on Windows 10 and Windows 11 when using Alder Lake processors. These include big names like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Total War: Three Kingdoms. (Update – Falling Orders are now available completely remove Denuvo, so that should be fine.)
Unfortunately, the problem seems to be caused by Alder Lake’s most exciting new feature: the combination of Performance cores (P-core) and smaller Efficiency cores (E-core). In the affected games, Denuvo completely mistook the E cores for being from another system, resulting in crashes and inability to load properly.
Some games will work fine on Windows 11 but not on Windows 10, and while some games are reported to be affected on both operating systems. Among them, some games – marked with an asterisk in the list below – will get better on Windows 11 after the mid-November patch, Intel has also promised to fix the rest, though No timeframe has been given for implementation.
Here are all the Denuvo games that may crash on 12th generation chips on Windows 10 and 11:
- Anthem *
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
- Strong default 2*
- Fishing Sim World *
- Far Cry Primal
- Fernbus Simulator
- Football Manager 2019 *
- Football Manager Touch 2019 *
- Football Manager 2020 *
- Football Manager Touch 2020 *
- For the sake of honor
- Legend of Mana *
- Lost in random
- Madden 22
- The man eats
- Mortal Kombat 11 *
- Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered
- Sea of Solitude *
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
- Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 and 2 *
- Total War: Warhammer
- Tourist Bus Simulator
And here are the games specifically affected on Windows 10:
- Ace Combat 7
- Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
- Assassins Creed Origins
- Vein code
- eFootball 2021
- F1 2019
- Far Cry New Dawn
- FIFA 19
- FIFA 20
- Football Manager 2021
- Football Manager Touch 2021
- Ghost Recon Break Point
- Ghost Recon Wildlands
- Immortals Fenyx Rising
- Cause only 4
- Life is Strange 2
- Madden 21
- Monopoly Plus
- Need for heat rate
- scott traveler vs world
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Shinobi Striker
- Soulcalibur VI
- Starlink
- Team Sonic Racing
- Total War Saga – Three Kingdoms
- Train Sim World
- Train Sim World 2
- Wolfenstein Youngblood
Hoo boy, that’s a lot of games that should work but might not. I say “maybe” because when I was testing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Windows 11 for Intel Core i5-12600K and Intel Core i9-12900K review, it seems to work fine throughout, never crashing or failing to load – so you might as well get lucky and avoid Denuvo getting confused. It’s a big shame though, since these are some Best CPU for gaming.
While busy with actual fixes (along with Denuvo), Intel has at least propose a solution, which involves temporarily disabling the E cores while you play the game. This is said to be possible by enabling “Old Game Compatibility Mode” in your motherboard’s BIOS, then pressing the Scroll Lock key to put the E cores to standby. However, like PCMag discovered, this mode is not available on all Alder Lake-compatible motherboards and will need to be added later through an update. Sure enough, I checked the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero that I’m using and didn’t find any such Legacy mode in the BIOS.
Hopefully everything will be sorted out soon, as while a lot of these games are relatively old and/or have reduced player bases, the number of games negatively impacted by the CPU is completely out of reach. all new will actually be zero.
