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Intel slips out Vulkan driver beta for Windows

Plus bug-fixes

Chipzilla has decided Vulkan, the replacement technology for the ancient OpenGL, is worth supporting and has announced a bunch of beta drivers that implement the API.

Vulkan 1.0 landed last month, with Intel joining AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Google in promising to support it.

AMD announced its beta drivers in synch with the launch of Vulkan.

Intel's support is in this set of Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 drivers.

The drivers are for sixth-generation Intel Core and related processors. They will let Vulkan users access CPU-integrated GPU features like the Iris Pro.

Vulkan is designed for developers that need more direct access to the underlying hardware than OpenGL offers, and in particular, it makes better use of GPUs that might have spare cycle time because of OpenGL's single-threaded behaviour.

Intel had already released Vulkan drivers for Linux over at its open source community site 01.org.

The drivers also incorporate some bug fixes in Windows 10 applications including BSODs, crashes, graphics corruption, and “random black rectangle artifacts in Star Wars Battlefront”. ®

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