Intel has recently changed its naming and distribution schemes for its graphics drivers designed for Windows 10, previously known as Universal Windows Drivers. Now referred to as DCH drivers, this marks the second major release of the company's graphics drivers following the change, and the company is leaving a stark warning to users transitioning between the old and the new drivers, given that the latter is not backward compatible:
WARNING: Failure to follow the guidance below may result in system instability
These new drivers labeled as Windows DCH graphics drivers aren't backward compatible with our previous graphics drivers that we are now labeling Legacy. This means if later you want to revert to a Legacy driver you will need to uninstall the driver via Windows Apps and Features and reboot the system before installing a Legacy driver. Failure to do so may result in minor to major system instability.
DO NOT use the INF / Have-Disk method to install or uninstall this driver, as it bypasses the Intel installer designed to install these new drivers, thereby possibly resulting in minor to major system instability. For this reason, we're not providing the ZIP file for the next several driver releases while users transition to this new Microsoft* driver platform.
With that public service announcement out of the way, let's consider the few optimizations and fixes contained within. As is expected, the release comprises of launch drivers for a few new games, which include Dirt Rally 2.0, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and Apex Legends. Alongside these, the drivers bring with them performance improvements for Arma 3.
The listed new features with version 25.20.100.6577 of Intel's drivers are as follows:
Performance improvements and optimizations for Arma 3 on 6th Generation Intelฎ Core processors or higher.
Power and performance benefits for DX12 games and applications using placed resources.
In addition, the drivers also bring some new changes that developers may be interested in, largely having to do with Microsoft's foray into the application of machine learning to gaming through the use of its DirectML API:
DirectML Metacommands - this driver release contains functional fixes and performance improvements
while adding support for a few features:
○ Improved GPU frequency ramp speed giving a performance boost to Metacommand enabled
workloads
○ Support for Softplus activation
○ Support for fused operations to improve performance.
○ Support for Pooling Metacommand - this operation now uses metacommands for both FP32 and FP16
datatypes and is common in many topologies like Squeezenet, Resnet, Inception etc.
Enables Indigo benchmark application to run.
Adds a compiler API for DX11 and DX12 shaders to allow compiling shaders offline to analyze the ISA (native code) generated. This can run independently of the runtime driver and is expected to understand shader performance.
The company also fixed intermittent crashes and glitches in a number of games and applications, alongside a few other tweaks and fixes:
Intermittent crashes or hangs may occur in Cinema4D, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, vkQuake2
Minor graphics anomalies may be observed in Final Fantasy XV and Microsoft Edge browser.
OpenGL stability fixes for background applications.
Few Internal panels may show a black screen after installing graphics driver.
Content protection may not enable when resuming from sleep after connecting display port monitor.
Rotation may not be persistent when swapping displays in multi-monitor configurations.
Aspect ratio options may be missing in Intelฎ Graphics Control Panel for HDMI displays.
Garbage may be seen while using Multi Stream Transport (MST) monitors.
No software release is perfect, of course, and the drivers also come with a few known issues you should be wary of:
Minor graphics anomalies may be observed in Battlefield V (DX11), Apex Legends (6th Generation Processors only), Arma 3 (6th Generation Processors only), Re-Legion and other games.
Intermittent crashes or hangs may occur in Crackdown 3, and other games.
Corruptions may be seen in a video recorded by Cyberlink screen recorder.
Color band may be observed on either side of Netflix playback on HDR displays.
The supported OS versions for this release include 64-bit versions of the Fall Creators Update (1709) and newer versions of Windows 10. The list of hardware supported by this release includes the 6th generation of Intel Core and related processors with Intel HD Graphics 510 or higher, Intel Iris Graphics 540 or higher, or Intel UHD Graphics 610 or higher. Also included are Xeon processors with Intel HD Graphics P530 and Pentium or Celeron processors with Intel HD Graphics 500 or 505 or Intel UHD Graphics 600 or 605.
As noted in the warning above, the company is not providing a zip version of the drivers with this release - and the next few ones - in order to ensure all users transition to the new driver paradigm properly.
You can get the drivers
from Intel's website here, and can peruse the
complete list of release notes here.
source
