News Intel Ends Day 0 Game GPU Driver Support For 10th Gen and Older CPUs

[Admin]

Intel 6th to 10th Generation processors will now receive quarterly software ups.

Intel Ends Day 0 Game GPU Driver Support For 10th Gen and Older CPUs : Read more

 

[Udyr]

2 (almost 3) years old product = legacy?

Very nice, Intel... very nice.

 

[thestryker]

It very much makes sense from a software development standpoint since the newer architectures are all Xe based and they have a ton of work still to do on the driver side to support DGPUs.

 

[taz-nz]

2 (almost 3) years old product = legacy?

Very nice, Intel... very nice.

You have to remember from the 7th -> 10th gen intel basically just recycled the same CPU design with the same iGPU, just adding 2 core and associated 4mb cache, and a couple hundred extra MHz each gen. So the 10th gen is basically a half decade old design.

Intel® Product Specification Comparison


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[cryoburner]

You have to remember from the 7th -> 10th gen intel basically just recycled the same CPU design with the same iGPU, just adding 2 core and associated 4mb cache, and a couple hundred extra MHz each gen. So the 10th gen is basically a half decade old design.

That doesn't matter from a consumer perspective. What matters is that a CPU series that was still current-gen up until a little over 1 year ago is already getting relegated to legacy driver support for its integrated graphics. This is the kind of thing that makes people wary of Intel's upcoming dedicated graphics cards. They don't exactly have a history of ensuring good long-term support for their graphics hardware.

It's just that the old iGPUs won't have access to new games.

Or more accurately, they just won't receive optimizations and fixes for new games on Intel's end, and won't get new driver-level features. Most new games that could otherwise run on these underpowered iGPUs should still work, they just might not run as well in some cases.

But you would think, at a time when Intel is moving into the dedicated graphics market and they are open with the fact that the drivers are not going to be optimal at launch, that they would try to project an image of them intending to support their hardware for many years. Ditching hardware a year after its successor launches is not exactly conducive of that message. I suppose they are likely focused on optimizing drivers for their new architecture now though, and want to put as many resources toward that as possible, since they will soon be getting directly compared against the more mature drivers from their competitors.

 

[taz-nz]

That doesn't matter from a consumer perspective. What matters is that a CPU series that was still current-gen up until a little over 1 year ago is already getting relegated to legacy driver support for its integrated graphics.

The thing is any game that's likely to benefit from this type of optimization, is unlikely to be playable on a half decade old iGPU design. Those games that are playable on something as anemic as the UHD 630, aren't likely to need these types of optimization to run well.

The number of people actually effected by this is a truly tiny.

 

[InvalidError]

2 (almost 3) years old product = legacy?

Very nice, Intel... very nice.

It is just "day-0 game support" and you basically cannot play modern games that require any degree of game-specific driver optimizations on pre-Xe IGPs anyway. Nothing of value is lost here.

 

[logainofhades]

As the only things useful about an Intel IGP is quick sync, and troubleshooting a dead GPU, and allowing system use when GPU is dead, this really doesn't matter. If you care about IGP gaming, you should be buying a Ryzen APU to start with.

 

[InvalidError]

As the only things useful about an Intel IGP is quick sync, and troubleshooting a dead GPU, and allowing system use when GPU is dead, this really doesn't matter.

Maybe for enthusiasts. For the market as a whole though, most PCs and laptops don't have a GPU, which is how Intel gets a 62% overall graphics market share vs 20% for Nvidia.

 

[Giroro]

Intel's iGPUs had driver support?

I think the last time I tried to update an Intel iGPU driver, I got locked into an endless loop of Intel telling me their official drivers are unsigned and to get the updated drivers from Microsoft, Microsoft telling me to get the drivers from HP, and HP telling me to buy a new computer. This was for a laptop that was new, at the time.

 

[mitch074]

I wonder how AMD managed to ship unified drivers for 10+ years then.
If recent commits on the open source Intel driver are any indication, the main problem they have is that the driver team has no idea how to manage dedicated VRAM and never structured the driver for NUMA. So now they have to review it from the ground up and instead of doing it properly, they forked it and are mothballing the iGPU branch.

 

[InvalidError]

they forked it and are mothballing the iGPU branch.

What does 10th-gen and older vs 11th-gen and up have in common? 10th and below are non-Xe, 11th and up are Xe which is also the foundation for its discrete GPUs.

Intel forked off the 10th-gen and older stuff that wasn't really seriously meant to run graphics-intensive stuff to focus on Xe which is and likely has much in common with its driver development hell GPUs.

 

[mitch074]

What does 10th-gen and older vs 11th-gen and up have in common? 10th and below are non-Xe, 11th and up are Xe which is also the foundation for its discrete GPUs.

Intel forked off the 10th-gen and older stuff that wasn't really seriously meant to run graphics-intensive stuff to focus on Xe which is and likely has much in common with its driver development hell GPUs.

The Xe driver used for the discrete cards is the same as the one used for 11th and 12th gen embedded graphics, and the latter was developed first because developers didn't have discrete cards to program against.
A recent fix to improve ray tracing on discrete cards did one thing : allocate the dedicated VRAM first instead of using whatever (i.e. system RAM). This fix has zero effect on 11th and 12th gen iGPU, but improved performance for discrete cards by a factor of 100 (dixit the developer who posted the fix). Considering that DX11 and older / OpenGL drivers did resource allocation themselves (contrary to Vulkan and DX12, where the game's dev has to do it), it is perfectly reasonable to deduce that current Xe drivers simply don't take the possibility of discrete GPUs having dedicated VRAM into account.
Thus, their abysmal performance when compared with their theoretical compute power, and the need to refactor them from the ground up. Due to the urgency of the situation, cross-validating the driver against embedded graphics (again, 11 and 12-gen) would take too much time, so the latter was forked into a maintenance-only branch until discrete cards don't suck as much. Maybe then both branches will be merged back together, but I would be mightily surprised if that took place within the next 18 months. More than likely, it's,going to take years.