Intel Changing Tone on Graphics Support, Releases Performance-Boosting Driver For All Current iGPUs

[patrickjp93]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-driver-performance-haswell-iris,27604.html

 

Edit: the driver goes to ALL of Intel's integrated graphics options.

 

84% better Doom 3 performance...

 

More on point, everyone likes to rag about how bad the Intel iGPUs are, but we all knew the real reason was actually the drivers and not the basic hardware (missing tessellation and polymorph hardware engines aside), where both Iris Pro 5200 and Kaveri have ~850 GFlops of peak performance. Intel pushed 2 million lines of iGPU code to Linux for their upcoming Skylake processors (directly demonstrating a will to keep AMD out of the heterogeneous server chip market), and this just shows how serious they're getting on all fronts of GPUs from supercomputing to gaming. There are a number of games mentioned which received 10% performance boosts or more.

 

OpenCL performance is boosted 30%.

 

Angry Birds is no longer individually rendered on each frame. There is an adaptive rendering engine (much like real-time video compression) that only renders what it has to and leaves the rest the same.

 

Speculation: the APU wars have now begun in earnest.

[BallGum]

Nice post. Intel is doing pretty well it seems.

[Deletive]

Yes! now if only they sold the i5 4570r anywhere ;-;

This got me excited.

[patrickjp93]

I remember reading somewhere that Broadwell will further improve the iGPU by 40% over Haswell.

Broadwell-Y has 24 GPU cores vs. the top HD 4600 20 cores on the flagship 4790k. That's a 20% core increase, and the clock rate is about 35% lower due to TDP constraints for fanless environments, but remember the FPUs just got 2 clock cycles shaved off their multiple/divide instructions due to the die shrink. 

 

Yes! not if only they sold the i5 4570r anywhere ;-;

This got me excited.

This will extend to Broadwell's iGPUs no doubt.

[StingBull]

What's with Doom 3? All of the other games have like 10% improvement but Doom 3 is 84%

[Lord Pantaloons]

I would really like it if Intel actually sold desktop chips with the Iris Pro on the retail side. I would love to have an i3 with Iris Pro.

[Lord Pantaloons]

What's with Doom 3? All of the other games have like 10% improvement but Doom 3 is 84%

Doom 3 is ancient, therefore it's easier to run and would receive the most benefit from increased iGPU performance.

[patrickjp93]

Doom 3 is ancient, therefore it's easier to run and would receive the most benefit from increased iGPU performance.

In other words, I think they did it for the lulz and said "people can run all their older classic games amazingly well on our solutions."

 

 

I would really like it if Intel actually sold desktop chips with the Iris Pro on the retail side. I would love to have an i3 with Iris Pro.

They would NEVER put Iris Pro on the I3 series. It would destroy the corporate demand for their I5s and I7s. For the K-series processors or at least on I5, I could see that happening.

[Lord Pantaloons]

 

They would NEVER put Iris Pro on the I3 series. It would destroy the corporate demand for their I5s and I7s. For the K-series processors or at least on I5, I could see that happening.

Well first things first http://ark.intel.com/products/75989/Intel-Core-i3-4158U-Processor-3M-Cache-2_00-GHz so yea they do exist.

 

Now then, It wouldn't touch the high end markets sales at all. You can't buy any desktop i5/i7's with iris pro on retail, but the people that are likely to buy i5/i7 chips are going to have a dedicated GPU thus negating the need for any iGPU of any kind. If Intel released a desktop i3 with Iris pro graphics that rivaled or beat the performance of AMD's APU's on the graphics side then it would gain more of the market for Intel as people would buy them for combo HTPC/general usage PC's. While any i5/i7 chips that came out with iris pro would still be bought because the of the higher performance demand for particular applications to the right up to the extent at which an actual GPU would be needed.. No business is buying APU's for office PC's they're buying i3/i5/i7's already. The companies that need more GPU power but only a bit of CPU would buy i3's and the companies that need more CPU power would get the i5/i7's and if they need more GPU power they would have dedicated GPU's.

[patrickjp93]

Well first things first http://ark.intel.com/products/75989/Intel-Core-i3-4158U-Processor-3M-Cache-2_00-GHz so yea they do exist.

 

Now then, It wouldn't touch the high end markets sales at all. You can't buy any desktop i5/i7's with iris pro on retail, but the people that are likely to buy i5/i7 chips are going to have a dedicated GPU thus negating the need for any iGPU of any kind. If Intel released a desktop i3 with Iris pro graphics that rivaled or beat the performance of AMD's APU's on the graphics side then it would gain more of the market for Intel as people would buy them for combo HTPC/general usage PC's. While any i5/i7 chips that came out with iris pro would still be bought because the of the higher performance demand for particular applications to the right up to the extent at which an actual GPU would be needed.. No business is buying APU's for office PC's they're buying i3/i5/i7's already. The companies that need more GPU power but only a bit of CPU would buy i3's and the companies that need more CPU power would get the i5/i7's and if they need more GPU power they would have dedicated GPU's.

Correction: they would NEVER put Iris Pro on a DESKTOP I3.

[Lord Pantaloons]

Correction: they would NEVER put Iris Pro on a DESKTOP I3.

They should and if they're smart they will, i3's are faster than the APU's on the CPU side. Add Iris Pro and keep the price the same and suddenly the APU's are worthless.

[Notional]

Wow a massive 3-7% increase in most new games. I'm sure those 23 fps will benefit from that

 

That is some Nvidiaesque headline and cherry picked number.

 

Intel's release notes state that CMAA offers a higher-quality anti-aliasing effect without a performance impact when compared to MLAA and FXAA. To turn it on, customers merely head into the Intel Graphics control panel. The trick is that the feature must be turned on before playing a game and then turned off after the gamer is done so that "unintended" blurring doesn't take place in other applications.

 

So their increase is partly due to a proprietary AA, that has to be manually activated before a gamelaunch and manually deactivated after closing the game, so desktop application, won't get blurry.

 

Good for Intel none the less. But their iGPU's are nowhere near AMD's Kaveri yet. Making a huge fps increase in 1 game, that is a decade old, won't really change anything.

[patrickjp93]

They should and if they're smart they will, i3's are faster than the APU's on the CPU side. Add Iris Pro and keep the price the same and suddenly the APU's are worthless.

Lol, but they need enough heterogeneous headroom to let the I5 and I7 still be worth something going forward from Skylake.

[patrickjp93]

Wow a massive 3-7% increase in most new games. I'm sure those 23 fps will benefit from that

 

That is some Nvidiaesque headline and cherry picked number.

 

 

So their increase is partly due to a proprietary AA, that has to be manually activated before a gamelaunch and manually deactivated after closing the game, so desktop application, won't get blurry.

 

Good for Intel none the less. But their iGPU's are nowhere near AMD's Kaveri yet. Making a huge fps increase in 1 game, that is a decade old, won't really change anything.

It's the first driver they've released since launch and obviously they're experimenting with their proprietary AA. Improvement is improvement. The only reason Intel's iGPUs don't match AMD's in gaming is due to lack of a tessellation and polymorph engine like I said. Don't forget Intel still has a huge expandability advantage for scientific computing and has the higher compute performance by far. 

 

Why this is game-changing is the precedent it sets as well as the tone of Intel going forward. They wouldn't go to the trouble of doing this unless they meant to make a big market move.

 

Stop being a troll on all my threads and please take announcements at their real value. I didn't say Iris Pro all of a sudden had better gaming performance than Kaveri. I said Intel is moving in all the right directions (Iris 6200 for desktop is not yet known however). By extension, I'm now going to say AMD is in huge trouble, especially if Intel's driver support going forward stays steady and strong.

[Lord Pantaloons]

Lol, but they need enough heterogeneous headroom to let the I5 and I7 still be worth something going forward from Skylake.

The iGPU side will be similar or better on the i5/i7's but those extra cores and extra cores+HT make the higher end chips worth it.

[Deletive]

The iGPU side will be similar or better on the i5/i7's but those extra cores and extra cores+HT make the higher end chips worth it.

something comparable in the 100-120$ dollar range to a a8 7600 could do wonders.

[patrickjp93]

something comparable in the 100-120$ dollar range to a a8 7600 could do wonders.

I think that's what Intel's headed for on Skylake, but still we need to see the other hardware engines come into play if it's going to be great at gaming and not just compute.

[GoodBytes]

Don't care. Their drivers are extreamly buggy, and still lack full support of DirectX, and OpenGL, despite the companies game.

The day games will stop crashing with errors about unsupported API calls from DirectX or OpenGL, let alone have features in their drivers that works on reverse then mentioned, then I'll be interested.

[Notional]

Why this is game-changing is the precedent it sets as well as the tone of Intel going forward. They wouldn't go to the trouble of doing this unless they meant to make a big market move.

 

Stop being a troll on all my threads and please take announcements at their real value. I didn't say Iris Pro all of a sudden had better gaming performance than Kaveri. I said Intel is moving in all the right directions (Iris 6200 for desktop is not yet known however). By extension, I'm now going to say AMD is in huge trouble, especially if Intel's driver support going forward stays steady and strong.

 

It's not gamechanging if they are still more expensive and less performing.

 

You claim Kaveri and Isis pro has the approx. same tflops:

 

(...) where both Iris Pro 5200 and Kaveri have ~850 GFlops of peak performance.

 

Iris pro 5200 has 832 theoretical tflops and Kaveri has 856 theoretical tflops. And the drivers suck for Intel. Like I said, good for Intel for moving in the right direction, but lets see some results, before we conclude anything. You make it sound like AMD is not going to release anything better to compete with Intel.

Why do you call me a troll whenever I expose your manipulation and BS? The news should be enough in itself without any of that, because this IS interesting news.

[patrickjp93]

It's not gamechanging if they are still more expensive and less performing.

 

You claim Kaveri and Isis pro has the approx. same tflops:

 

 

Iris pro 5200 has 832 theoretical tflops and Kaveri has 856 theoretical tflops. And the drivers suck for Intel. Like I said, good for Intel for moving in the right direction, but lets see some results, before we conclude anything. You make it sound like AMD is not going to release anything better to compete with Intel.

Why do you call me a troll whenever I expose your manipulation and BS? The news should be enough in itself without any of that, because this IS interesting news.

I didn't manipulate or BS anything. This is game-changing for the market going forward, not the immediate term. And in compute Intel wins. That's a detail you miss. AIDA64 or Prime95 all the heavy compute stuff on just the GPU puts Iris 5200 ahead of the 7850k because peak theoretical and peak true performance on Intel's platform are closer. Intel still lacks a tesselation and polymorph engine, so in advanced modern games it won't change much, but the tone of Intel is changing, and that means market upsets going forward. 

 

You're a troll. You try to build arguments out of straw men and accuse me of doing the same just so you can argue!

 

I didn't say a thing regarding whether or not AMD would release something. I'm just saying AMD has to act fast and BIG to keep up with their competitor who already has the CPU edge and is primed to gain the iGPU edge.

[Builder]

Don't care. Their drivers are extreamly buggy, and still lack full support of DirectX, and OpenGL, despite the companies game.

The day games will stop crashing with errors about unsupported API calls from DirectX or OpenGL, let alone have features in their drivers that works on reverse then mentioned, then I'll be interested.

I've never had nor do I know anyone else who has had such a terrible experience with Intel graphics chips. It's actually the only graphics chip I've never had trouble with, because Linux/BSD support is fantastic for them.

 

Can't say much for Windows though. I played Minecraft on Ultra with a 128x texture pack at 70FPS with the HD4000 on my 3770K for a few months before buying a 660Ti. That was ages ago though, back in the 1.2.3 days. That's about it. 

[patrickjp93]

Don't care. Their drivers are extreamly buggy, and still lack full support of DirectX, and OpenGL, despite the companies game.

The day games will stop crashing with errors about unsupported API calls from DirectX or OpenGL, let alone have features in their drivers that works on reverse then mentioned, then I'll be interested.

You didn't read much, did you, or go to the driver release notes page... Full DX 11.2 support, full OpenGL 4.3 support, and complete support for all existing OpenCL libraries (apart from Mantle obviously).

[zacRupnow]

Now it'll be even better on DX12

[GoodBytes]

You didn't read much, did you, or go to the driver release notes page... Full DX 11.2 support, full OpenGL 4.3 support, and complete support for all existing OpenCL libraries (apart from Mantle obviously).

And yet, countless Steam games crashes on my mobile system, with DirectX and OpenGL API calls not being supported, despite getting the latest drivers directly from Intel web site.

Enjoying features like "Display Power Saving Technology", which dims the colors of the screen (at a software level, not hardware) on dark content being displayed, making you boost the screen brightness to compensate, defeating the purpose of saving power. As it adjust the colors at software level you have reduction of colors, meaning you see large stepping on gradients and things look strange. You can disable it, thank fully, which is great! However... at random... it decides to ignore your settings and have it enabled.

Oh but wait, I am not done!

If you play a game at lower resolution then what you have on your desktop, it doesn't scale the game to stretch the screen. For the longest time, Nvidia and AMD (ATI back then), had this option. Intel.. nope. Custom resolution allows you to create resolutions that already exists only, anything else is not supported (wonderful).

Until the latest version of the Intel drivers, I had an option to select the saturation level. You slide a bar from left to right, where left most was "Vivid", and right most is "Natural".

Yea, it's also on reverse. Vivid is natural, and natural is vivid. In the latest drivers, Intel didn't fix it, they just removed it. Granted it's crap option, like all software level color adjustments, but still. It shows how they given up.

And I have more.

You can clearly see, that the Intel drivers are simply completely outsourced to India or China, with 0 care, let alone testing from Intel part.

As for OpenCL. Start using PhotoShop with setting it up to use OpenCL. Good luck.

[patrickjp93]

And yet, countless Steam games crashes on my mobile system, with DirectX and OpenGL API calls not being supported, despite getting the latest drivers directly from Intel web site.

Enjoying features like "Display Power Saving Technology", which dims the colors of the screen (at a software level, not hardware) on dark content being displayed, making you boost the screen brightness to compensate, defeating the purpose of saving power. As it adjust the colors at software level you have reduction of colors, meaning you see large stepping on gradients and things look strange. You can disable it, thank fully, which is great! However... at random... it decides to ignore your settings and have it enabled.

Oh but wait, I am not done!

If you play a game at lower resolution then what you have on your desktop, it doesn't scale the game to stretch the screen. For the longest time, Nvidia and AMD (ATI back then), had this option. Intel.. nope. Custom resolution allows you to create resolutions that already exists only, anything else is not supported (wonderful).

Until the latest version of the Intel drivers, I had an option to select the saturation level. You slide a bar from left to right, where left most was "Vivid", and right most is "Natural".

Yea, it's also on reverse. Vivid is natural, and natural is vivid. In the latest drivers, Intel didn't fix it, they just removed it. Granted it's crap option, like all software level color adjustments, but still. It shows how they given up.

And I have more.

You can clearly see, that the Intel drivers are simply completely outsourced to India or China, with 0 care, let alone testing from Intel part.

As for OpenCL. Start using PhotoShop with setting it up to use OpenCL. Good luck.

One, did you get the new driver? Two, did those half-wits at Valve(yes I said it) use exotic libraries that AMD and Nvidia have shared between them and not Intel? Three, do you still have your computer in power-saver or balanced mode, because that is why the dimming happens. I get no such dimming on either my MacOS, Linux, or Windows for the exact same pictures.

 

Four, I did just open up Photoshop on my Windows 7 boot on my MBPr and set it to use OpenCL. It renders just fine and I think snappier than before.

 

Five, how exactly do you know who wrote the driver be it in India, korea, or the U.S.?