We?re back once again for the 3rd and likely final part to our evolving series previewing the performance of DirectX 12. After taking an initial look at discrete GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD in part 1, and then looking at AMD's integrated GPUs in part 2, today we'll be taking a much requested look at the performance of Intel's integrated GPUs. Does Intel benefit from DirectX 12 in the same way the dGPUs and AMD's iGPU have? And where does Intel's most powerful Haswell GPU configuration, Iris Pro (GT3e) stack up? Let's find out.

As our regular readers may recall, when we were initially given early access to WDDM 2.0 drivers and a DirectX 12 version of Star Swarm, it only included drivers for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Those drivers in turn only supported Kepler and newer on the NVIDIA side and GCN 1.1 and newer on the AMD side, which is why we haven't yet been able to look at older AMD or NVIDIA cards, or for that matter any Intel iGPUs. However as of late last week that changed when Microsoft began releasing WDDM 2.0 drivers for all 3 vendors through Windows Update on Windows 10, enabling early DirectX 12 functionality on many supported products.

With Intel WDDM 2.0 drivers now in hand, we?re able to take a look at how Intel's iGPUs are affected in this early benchmark. Driver version 10.18.15.4098, these drivers enable DirectX 12 functionality on Gen 7.5 (Haswell) and newer GPUs, with Gen 7.5 being the oldest Intel GPU generation that will support DirectX 12.