Staff – November 24, 2020 at 9:37 AM
Back in September, we launched 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors with Iris® Xe graphics, delivering incredible gaming, media and content creation capabilities to thin-and-light notebooks. Then, at the end of October, we introduced Intel® Iris® Xe MAX, our first discrete GPU in 20 years. Notebooks powered by Iris Xe MAX take advantage of Intel’s platform approach, combining 11th Gen Intel Core processors, discrete graphics capabilities, and unique software and hardware optimizations to unlock incredible gaming, creation, productivity and more.
At the heart of these supercharged capabilities is Intel® Deep Link technology, which allows Iris Xe MAX-based systems to utilize both Xe-based graphics engines to deliver supercharged AI and media encode performance. And, with dynamic power sharing, power is intelligently allocated across engines to boost CPU performance when it’s needed most.
In addition to our work to deliver great hardware platforms, we’re focused on delivering world-class gaming experiences through a rich suite of software capabilities. The Intel® Graphics Command Center, or IGCC for short, puts these features into the hands of gamers worldwide. In fact, this community-inspired, modern graphics control panel has been downloaded more than 200 million times!
Here, we’d like to share updates on two exciting new IGCC features.
The first is Game Sharpening, which utilizes an Intel-developed compute shader-based perceptual adaptive sharpening filter to enhance image clarity in your favorite games. This should come especially in handy for titles that use resolution scaling to strike the right balance between performance and image quality.
To ensure crisper images while avoiding the overshooting or “ringing” artifacts that other sharpening algorithms sometimes exhibit, we carefully studied how our algorithm responded to a wide range of inputs. And, to top it all off, Game Sharpening was designed to minimize computational overhead, meaning that gamers can look forward to both sharper images and great performance!
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Next up is Instant Game Tuning. Intel engineers are constantly working on software updates to ensure that Intel graphics processors deliver the best possible gaming experiences. Historically, our engineers would work on game-specific fixes and optimizations and roll them out as part of new driver packages. From there, users would need to download and install these new drivers.
We wanted to build a better way to rapidly get these improvements into users’ hands, and that’s what we’ve done with Instant Game Tuning.
Once Instant Game Tuning is enabled within IGCC, users can look forward to game-specific updates being delivered straight to their systems via the Intel Cloud.
While we still recommend downloading the latest drivers to get the most from Intel Graphics-powered systems, with Instant Game Tuning, gamers equipped with Intel Graphics can have peace of mind that their systems are always ready to tackle the latest games!
Game Sharpening is available as part of the latest release of IGCC, which you can download here. To experience Instant Game Tuning in addition to Game Sharpening, download the latest IGCC beta here.
Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex. Your costs and results may vary.
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