I’m told that right now most of the work to determine these settings is being done by hand by Intel engineers – and of that, I assume a lot of it is being taken from Intel’s existing gameplay settings service.
This allows Intel to adjust game settings on a fine-grained level, adjusting texture and shadow quality, rendering distance, internal AA settings, etc. Similar to how this works with other control panels, this function will actually go into a game and alter its settings to Intel’s suggested settings for the host computer. Going one step further, however, for 30 of those games, Intel also includes support for one-click graphics optimizations, which is indicated by the lightning bolt logo. This is actually dynamic with the setting itself, so higher levels of MSAA are flagged as causing a greater performance hit, etc. Meanwhile, towards the right of the control for that setting is an indicator to signal the performance impact of that setting, to offer a basic level of guidance about what the current setting will likely do to game performance. A small question mark next to each setting describes what the setting does, and includes photo demonstrating the concept as well. Meanwhile, Intel has also thrown in some functionality to better explain what these graphics settings do, as well as their performance impacts. For one of the 100 or so games on Intel’s list of supported games, this is relatively straightforward, and each game gets its own page with familiar driver-enforced settings such as anti-aliasing, v-sync, and anisotropic filtering. Front and center is a games-centric approach to settings, with the application preferring to offer game-specific settings when possible (scanning to discover what games are installed). Overall, the Graphics Command Center borrows a lot from other GPU control applications.
It also means that the control panel isn’t contingent on the checkered driver update schedules of PC OEMs users can always download the Graphics Command Center out of band.
In which case, using the Microsoft Store lets Intel tap into the OS’s built-in software update functionality.
Because Microsoft’s new DCH driver model requires drivers to be stripped down to the bare essentials and delivered in pieces – graphics control panels can’t be bundled – these sorts of applications instead need to be delivered separately. Yes, it’s a full-on UWP application with all of the “modern” flourishes that come with it, and this is actually an important part of Intel’s strategy.
The company calls it an “early access” release, and this is a fairly apt description for the utility as while it shows a level of polish and stability that comes with over a year’s work, Intel clearly isn’t done adding features to it yet.īut perhaps the most interesting tidbit about the Graphics Command Center is how it’s being distributed: rather than being bundled with Intel’s drivers, it’s being delivered through the Microsoft Store on Windows 10. The Intel Graphics Command Center works with 6 th Gen Core processors (Skylake) and later, which at this point is most Intel-powered systems sold in the last few years. To that end, the company is launching the new Graphics Command Center as part of their efforts to better support their current users, as well as new users going forward.
And while Intel doesn’t go so far as to name names, from their presentation it’s clear that they consider this kind of user-friendly functionality to now be a required, baseline feature for any GPU ecosystem in which case Intel is (or rather now, was) the only PC GPU vendor lacking an equivalent application. Which is to say, it’s designed to offer a highly visible and streamlined approach to a GPU control panel, making various features easy to find, and overall offering a more user-friendly experience than the company’s current control panel.
Starting from the top, Intel’s Graphics Command Center is largely cut from the same cloth as other modern graphics control panels, such as NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience and AMD’s Radeon Settings application. At the same time however, it’s also the first step in part of a larger process to prepare Intel’s software stack and overall software ecosystem ahead of the company’s ambitious plans to enter the discrete GPU market in 2020. Dubbed the Intel Graphics Command Center, the new control panel – or to be more technically accurate, the new app – is an effort from Intel to modernize a part of their overall graphics infrastructure, replacing the serviceable (but not necessarily loved) current iteration of the company’s control panel. Making their own contribution to this busy week of GPU and gaming news, this evening Intel took the wraps off of their previously teased new graphics control panel.