Well… I hate to say “I told you so” but… “I told you so”. You’ve made the argument that Intel is very good at building hardware, but not so good at building drivers (for gaming GPUs). The counter-argument I’ve heard is that Intel is one of the oldest GPU builders out there. And while I agree, I disagree in the context of these GPUs. These GPUs do exactly what Intel IGPs do well, as well as well. There is nothing to argue with him.

What you suddenly notice is that Intel doesn’t understand game optimization very well. This means that they specifically don’t have all of their 20+ year old “working” video games in their driver, and the layers between Vulkan, DX12 and pre-direct hardware (DX11 or 12d11) are still understood (read STILL).

There’s a reason the green and red drivers are so absurdly large (and though one factor is GeForce Experience – which I’d love to see nVidia start offering drivers without…). It is full of spots, nuances, and breakouts. Because game developers use patches, nuances, and hacks to build faster/better/cheaper games. Since when did some games have “flashing shadows” as a known issue with the GeForce 470-490 series of drivers? How long has VR been broken?

You can see that Intel currently performs well when you don’t need to use memory (it sounds crazy, but the reason nVidia and AMD stay consistent without the sizing bar is more of a trick with smart memory filling than Intel does with the sizing bar is a picture of not efficiency). The resizing bar is a solution to a problem that PCIe (and even AGP before that with a separate 8-bit bus to the CPU next to the main 32-bit bus) has been around for a long time (and where AMD/nVIdia had tricks for this). You also see Intel doing fairly reasonably well in the new DX12 games. This clearly shows what the focus is on the Blauw team…first ‘current’, then legacy (if they do at all because like Wine/Proton at work right now, every handy trick from a developer is in creating a proper game and making sure the driver can Being treated well is sometimes not rewarding.) That’s why you see DX11 games really cooked up on the Arc.

Games are very sensitive to directions. AMD and nVidia have been working for a long time to release a driver that works specifically well in a particular game (if they don’t work directly with developers at all), include these patches in the next driver release, and so the driver has patches worth up to 20 years Sometimes. However, the games follow a kind of Rogers curve. They know an early minority, a majority, the mainstream, and then usually disappear (before the next). Every once in a while the game hangs for a long time (Blizzard usually does this pretty well, although they usually evolve games to the point where they’re no longer what they used to be in terms of technology, and sometimes content as well). But soon most games became specialized.

Intel is in a tough dilemma though…but they show they do what they do…but for mainstream use I think it needs a few more generations.