Intel goes reverse on unified drivers, separates another group
Raptor, Alder, Tiger and Rocket Lake with their own drivers branch.
We have been notified by our readers that Intel has new drivers listed on its official website. While not yet confirmed, it appears that the company has split its Arc & Iris drivers into two branches. The new branch is specifically for 11th Gen to 14th Gen Core series CPUs, while the Arc & Iris branch will almost certainly carry only Arc graphics.
The current official Arc driver includes support for 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th Gen Core series, as well as Xe-LP DG1 discrete graphics and newer Arc Alchemist, Battlemage, and integrated Arc solutions. The new drivers are specifically for 11th–14th Gen Core series, but they also include support for DG1 graphics.
Intel’s new driver branch:
- 14th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel UHD Graphics
(Codename Raptor Lake Refresh) - 13th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel UHD Graphics
(Codename Raptor Lake-S, Raptor Lake-HX, Raptor Lake-H, Raptor Lake-P, Raptor Lake-U) - 12th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Xe Graphics and Intel UHD Graphics
(Codename Alder Lake-H, Alder Lake-P, Alder Lake-U, Alder Lake-S, Alder Lake-HX, Alder Lake-N, Twin Lake) - 11th Generation Intel Core Processors with Intel Iris Xe Graphics and Intel UHD Graphics
(Codename Tiger Lake, Tiger Lake–H, Rocket Lake) - Intel Iris Xe Discrete Graphics (Codename DG1)
This new driver carries version number 7076, which is newer than the Arc driver (7029). Intel already offers other drivers for graphics, such as Arc Pro series, 7th–10th Gen Core series, and data center GPUs. The most important detail is that the 7th–10th Gen drivers have not been updated since March. This shows how Intel phases out support for older drivers, eventually focusing on newer graphics with the latest game releases and added features.
The reason we say it is not yet confirmed is because Intel has not released a new Arc driver that excludes 11th–14th Gen support. Once that happens, the older Core CPU series will move to a slower update branch.
Intel does not appear to be following NVIDIA and AMD who tend to offer regular support for more than just 2-3 generations. AMD is now focusing on RDNA GPU family, while NVIDIA is now phasing out Maxwell support.
Source: Intel