Intel GPU Drivers Moan

[watercooled]

So, you know if you have an AMD or Nvidia GPU, how you go to their websites and pretty much click one button to get the clearly-labelled latest WHQL or non-WHQL drivers, and that's it?

Then why on Earth can the company with by far the largest GPU market share not even manage to decide which drivers are actually the latest ones? Seriously, go and find the latest driver for a recent Intel GPU. Think you've found it? Great, now look at the version numbers/dates and realise the 'previously released' ones are actually newer than the 'latest' ones!

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/pro...ore-Processors

Even the naming isn't consistent!

OK so maybe they want you to just use the auto-detect too? But that seems to, again, recognise newer drivers as outdated and installs older drivers, all labelled as non-beta so it's not like they're just keeping Beta drivers separate.

And just to add to that, I had to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox as I was getting fairly frequent graphical corruption, something I've never had to do with AMD or Nvidia. They even list that sort of thing under 'known issues' months ago in their release notes. Any chance of a fix then Intel? Or are you still stuck deciding what date is most recent?

Seriously how do they expect to be taken seriously in the IGP gaming market when they make even choosing the right driver a right pain in the bottom?

Or is there just an easier way I'm not aware of? Windows Update only seems to install fairly dated GPU drivers as usual, so surely that's not the best option?

[Bonebreaker777]

Now - now, I had to disable GPU HW acceleration previously on laptops with AMD dual graphics cause no mater witch browser we used, all seemed to have issues with Flash or even simple streams with various driver versions.

And don't even get me started on installing drivers for dual graphics laptops with Win7! God forbid you would like to use AMDs own new version, autodetect on or off.

I usually get my latest drivers from station-drivers. Easy to navigate (for me) and in a nice order.

[watercooled]

Dual graphics is something I've not used myself but like I said, I haven't had those problems; I've no doubt every GPU manufacturer on the market has a couple of problems in certain scenarios. WRT mobile drivers though, funny you should mention about the stock drivers thing, I think that might be a relatively common issue. A while back my laptop with an Nvidia GPU would only work properly with the Toshiba-provided drivers; the stock Nvidia ones wouldn't correctly detect the display resolution and although I didn't have a power meter at the time seemed to cause higher power draw (shorter battery life).

And that brings me on to another point, although it's not entirely Intel's fault - on a Linux server I run I noticed idle power draw increased after an upgrade. Turns out some driver bug or other was causing problems on a small number of laptops so it was decided to completely disable a power-saving state on the entire Ubuntu distro. You could turn it back on by adding a line to GRUB but it did seem like a poor decision to increase power/drop battery life by a significant amount on every system rather than properly detecting problem systems and selectively working around the issue.

The thing is, most of the issues with Intel's drivers I mentioned in the OP would be extremely easy to fix i.e. properly ordering drivers, sticking with a naming system, giving you the latest one without having to search through them and having the autodetect utility work properly.

I considered using a third-party download mirror but are Intel's drivers universal like with AMD/Nvidia or do you get separate drivers for every GPU?