Intel’s latest generation of CPUs, the Alder Lake line up, was launched in late 2021. It was a big improvement over the previous generation, offering a heterogeneous composition of its cores which consist of performance cores and efficiency cores. Now, some systems which are equipped with these CPUs (a total of 18 12th Generation CPUs), specifically the ones that have Intel UHD 770 integrated GPU are having issues with Chrome, Edge and other chromium based browsers. This issue was caused by a recent driver update which caused these browsers to become very laggy, to such an extent that it would take multiple seconds to register a single click. The browser would appear choppy while scrolling and would freeze sometimes. The issue is severe in systems which use a mechanical hard drive to store swap data. Apparently, this driver bug causes chrome to store RAM data in swap memory unnecessarily. Although this issue is not causing any hardware related damage to the system, an issue like this is not expected from a company like Intel.
What can you do if you are facing this issue?
Intel has admitted that this issue was caused by their recent driver update. They recommend that users affected by this issue update their browser, disable hardware acceleration, clean install the graphics driver and update their windows operating system. Also, a costlier option to solve this issue is to switch to a SSD, because it offers faster read/write speed than a mechanical drive. The suggested steps are pretty easy to implement, so you should definitely try them if you are hit by this driver bug.
Intel is about to release its dedicated GPUs line up in the near future, and an issue like this does not inspire confidence in the chip giant’s ability to design quality drivers for a bug-free user experience and optimal performance. Hopefully this issue gets fixed permanently by a driver update. Until then, use the above steps to deal with this issue.