Upcoming Intel HD 4000 driver may add up to 10% performance

At GDC 2013 Intel announced HD 4000 GPUs will be receiving a major driver update. The driver, which should be out this week, is expected to both lower power consumption and increase graphics performance. Intel claims graphics performance should see a 10% increase but no figures were given on expected power savings. According to Ultrabook News, Intel is quite proud of being able to pull off gains in seemingly opposite directions.

Though originally designed for Haswell processors, Intel said it will be making the new driver available for Ivy Bridge too. The HD Graphics 4000 update should be going by the version number of 15.31 and will also be bringing support for OpenCL 1.2. For those unfamiliar with OpenCL, it is a computing language which allows programs to take advantage of both the CPU and the GPU, or essentially open up the GPU for non-graphical computing tasks.

Intel will also be outing a new driver for its HD 3000 GPUs, details of which are sparse at the moment. The GPU doesn’t support OpenCL for the time being and it is unknown if the new driver will bring any performance or efficiency improvements. In other words the worst case scenario is it could just end up bringing a few bug-fixes.

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