Intel HD Graphics Driver Update Quietly Drops Support for 5th Gen CPUs

While most gamers use a discrete NVIDIA or AMD GPU, there are still plenty of gamers using Intel built-in graphics. A quick glance at Steam’s monthly hardware survey confirms this to be around 15.54% at the moment. Although this is down 2% from last year, it still accounts for thousands and thousands of users.

Unfortunately for many of those, Intel’s latest graphics driver update quietly only includes support for Intel 7th generation Kaby Lake and 6th generation Skylake CPUs. This cuts off the majority of gamers using embedded Intel graphics since they still use Intel GPUs that are released before August 2015. Users on a Broadwell, Haswell, Braswell, or older would have to use the last HD graphics driver 15.40 update.

The latest 15.46 driver update officially now only supports the following:

• 7th Generation Intel® Core Processors, related Pentium/ Celeron Processors, and Intel Xeon Processors, with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640, 650, and Intel HD Graphics 610, 615, 620, 630, and P630
• 6th Generation Intel Core Processors, Intel Core M, and related Pentium Processors, with Intel Iris Graphics 540, Intel Iris Graphics 550, Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580, and Intel HD Graphics 510, 515, 520, and 530
• Intel Xeon Processor E3-1500M v5 Product Family with Intel HD Graphics P530
• Pentium/ Celeron Processors with Intel HD Graphics 500 and 505

Intel HD Graphics Driver Update 15.46

The latest update to Intel’s HD graphics driver provides official launch support for Fortnite, Gigantic and Minecraft Storymode: Season 2. These games can easily run on Intel HD graphics, especially Minecraft. This driver also enables Windows 10 ‘Creator’s Update’ features. These updates include support for toolkits to assist developers in creating Computer Vision and Deep Learning applications.