New Intel Graphics Driver Boosts DX11 Gaming Performance

By Nathan Kirsch

Intel Graphics released Windows 10 DCH driver version 26.20.100.7000 and it has a good number of performance optimizations to talk about. DX11 game titles like Overwatch, Paladins and Hearthstone get a performance boost thanks to enabling Pixel Shader SIMD Profile-Guided Optimizations in the driver. Intel also made a number of optimizations that increased performance in Fortnite and all games using Unreal Engine 4.

Intel failed to disclose how much of a performance increase that they managed to get from their hard work. Hopefully in the future Intel will be able to give a bit more detail on just how much of an impact their performance improvements make. You can download the latest Windows 10 DCH driver here.

fornite

Performance improvements

  • Enabled Pixel Shader SIMD Profile-Guided Optimizations, selecting the best pixel shader compilation mode automatically, to boost performance in DX11 titles including Overwatch, Paladins and Hearthstone.
  • Performance optimizations for Fortnite and other Unreal Engine 4-based titles.
  • DirectML D3D12 MetaCommand performance optimizations for fp16 topologies.

Developer highlights

  • Support for SPV_EXT_physical_storage_buffer extension.
  • New Vulkan Extension VK_EXT_buffer_device address allows the application to query a 64-bit buffer device address for a buffer.
  • Added OpenCL SPIR-V support to the public IntelGPUCompiler API on top of existing DX11 and DX12 support. IntelGPUCompiler API allows developers to compile their shaders into Intel GPU assembly instructions.
  • Implemented the latest iteration of VK_KHR_swapchain (version 70) to allow binding memory from swap chain to raw images created by applications.