In an amazing twist of fate, Intel has fully confirmed that it and AMD are working to release updated graphics drivers for the Kaby Lake-G hybrid APU lineup. According to a moderator from the Intel forums, the drivers are already completed and have been transferred over to AMD for final testing. Oh, and the cherry on top -- these drivers are Windows 11 certified!
The Kaby Lake-G architecture was born out of the most bizarre collaboration ever seen in the semiconductor landscape with AMD and Intel working on a single product together. Both companies put aside their competitive natures to make a new APU featuring Vega RX graphics inside a Kaby Lake SoC. It was a powerhouse of a design, focused on fighting Nvidia's first generation of Pascal Max-Q graphics cards.
The first flagship to truly showcase Kaby Lake-G's power was the Hades Canyon NUC 8, featuring a Core i7-8809G with four cores, eight threads, and a 24 compute unit Vega RX GPU. In our review, we noted how impressive its performance was in such a small compact chassis and its gaming performance was surprisingly close to that of a GTX 1060 6GB desktop-class GPU, with a power rating of just 100W.
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Despite all this, driver support for the Kaby lake-G chips was barely maintained. In 2019 Intel left users hanging for a full year before new game-ready graphics drivers came out for Kaby Lake-G. Even then the 'new driver' was merely a PDF that redirected users to an AMD download portal, which would allow users to download Adrenalin 2020 drivers instead of Intel drivers.
But even that was short-lived. A few months later in June of 2020, AMD quietly killed off Kaby Lake-G driver support in its mainstream Adrenaline driver program. Leaving users stranded with older drivers that did not have driver enhancements for the then-new Windows 10 2004 update.
Given Intel and AMD's track record, it's amazing to hear a new driver update is coming to Kaby Lake-G and it's a Windows 10 and 11 supported driver as well. This will give Kaby Lake-G some extra life to long-time owners.
