What simply occurred? Effective instantly, Intel is winding down recreation driver assist for older iGPUs. Integrated graphics aren’t meant for critical efficiency, however current ones can run a lot of right this moment’s common video games, together with those whose assist Intel is downgrading.
This week, Intel introduced that lively software program assist is now just for eleventh era CPUs and newer. It is shifting its sixth by means of tenth era CPUs to legacy software program assist. So, apart from crucial fixes and safety patches, older processors will get updates much less regularly than newer ones.
Essentially, Intel is splitting its drivers into two teams in the identical package deal. The legacy set is for each processor from Skylake to Ice Lake, together with Elkhart, Lakefield, and Jasper Lake. Active assist is for Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, and presumably the Raptor Lake processors set to launch in October. Mainly, this implies older Intel built-in graphics customers will not get any extra day-0 recreation assist drivers.
While newer iGPUs nonetheless obtain assist drivers for brand new video games as they launch, the others should watch for updates to come back each quarter. To test your system’s CPU on Windows, head to Settings > System > About. Next to “processor,” the primary digit after the hyphen signifies your processor’s era.
Pushing the seven-year-old Skylake CPUs again to legacy assist is unsurprising, however the tenth era processors are barely two years previous. The assist downgrade might probably have an effect on gaming efficiency for portion of iGPU customers.
In the June 2022 Steam {hardware} survey, all Intel iGPUs mixed made up a few seven % share of polled programs. However, most of the hottest PC video games aren’t on Steam and are gentle sufficient for iGPUs to deal with. These embrace titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, Valorant, and Sid Meier’s Civilization 6.
Even TechSpot’s benchmark present an Ice Lake iGPU managing playable framerates in a few of these video games, together with Rocket League and Grand Theft Auto V. So it is onerous to say what number of customers this can affect.