Intel is slowly moving into the dedicated graphics market, and its graphics driver releases are more like Nvidia and AMD versions than before. For its dedicated Arc GPUs and similar architecture integrated GPUs that ship with Intel 11th and 12th generation processors, the company promises monthly driver releases, as well as zero-day drivers with special fixes and performance improvements for just released games.
At the same time, Intel GPU driver updates are starting to downplay what used to be the company’s bread and butter: low-cost integrated GPUs. The company announced yesterday that it will be transitioning the vast majority of its integrated GPUs to a “legacy support model “that will provide quarterly updates to fix security issues and “critical”bugs, but won’t include fixes for specific games that are newer. GPU receive.
This change affects a wide range of GPUs, and not all of them are ancient history. Among other things, this change will affect all integrated GPUs of the following generations of processors, from lower HD/UHD unnumbered GPUs to faster Intel Iris-branded versions:
- 6th Generation Core (introduced 2015, codenamed Skylake)
- 7th generation Core (introduced in 2016, codenamed Kaby Lake)
- 8th generation Core (introduced 2017–2018, codenamed Kaby Lake-R, Whiskey Lake, and Coffee Lake)
- 9th Gen Core (introduced 2018, codenamed Coffee Lake)
- 10th Gen Core (introduced 2019-2020, codenamed Comet Lake and Ice Lake)
- Various Celeron and Pentium N4000, N5000, and N6000 series processors (introduced 2017-2021, codenamed Gemini Lake, Elkhart Lake, and Jasper Lake)
Intel still offers a single 1.1GB driver package that supports everything from the latest Iris Xe GPUs to Skylake-era integrated graphics, but the installation package now contains a single driver for newer GPUs that are still getting new ones. functions, and the second. driver for older GPUs in legacy support model. The company takes a similar approach to driver updates for its Wi-Fi adapters, including multiple driver versions in a single download package to support multiple hardware generations.
Intel’s 10th generation processors and their accompanying integrated GPUs are only three years old, and the Jasper Lake Pentium and Celeron processors are actually Intel’s latest low-end PC offerings. The problem is that their GPUs (based on the creatively named “Gen9 “architecture) are much older, dating back to late 2015 6th gen Skylake chips. Intel used Kaby Lake-era UHD 620 and UHD 630 GPUs in four different processor generations, opting to increase the number of CPU cores in the new chips rather than allocate more chip space to the redesigned GPU.
Intel has shipped a newer, faster GPU in the 10nm Ice Lake processors, which share the same 10th Gen Core branding as the 14nm Comet Lake processors. Ice Lake GPUs are also moving to a legacy support model. But they were mostly used in thin-and-light portable devices like the 2020 Intel MacBook Air and Surface Pro 7, rather than systems that require a lot of gaming.
As a result, the performance and stability of these GPUs is as good as it gets, and they are not powerful enough to play many of the new games that Intel is providing fixes for in new GPU drivers. From a practical standpoint, the loss of a continuous stream of new driver updates is unlikely to have much of an impact on users of these GPUs, especially since Intel will continue to fix issues as they arise.
Both AMD and Nvidia offer similar legacy driver packages for older GPUs that won’t benefit from new optimizations but that sometimes need security or stability fixes.