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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4585/intels-haswell-igp-to-feature-directx-111-increased-professional-application-support
Intel's Haswell IGP to Feature DirectX 11.1, Increased Professional Application Support
by Andrew Cunningham on August 5, 2011 6:08 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Workstation
- Ivy Bridge
- Haswell
- APUs
- graphics
Intel's integrated graphics processors have long had a poor reputation when it comes to gaming, and while the IGPs get a little closer to competitiveness with each iteration, that is still largely true. However, there's another area in which the chips are surprisingly competitive: workstation applications.
At least on paper, Intel's current IGPs are fully certified for high-end programs like Photoshop CS5, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks, and future Ivy Bridge and Haswell IGPs add a lot of other big names to the list. This slow build-up of certifications means that Intel solutions may begin to replace dedicated FireGL and Quadro cards from AMD and nVidia in low and mid-end workstations, another contribution to the seemingly inevitable erosion of the low-end and mainstream markets for dedicated graphics.
The roadmap also says that Haswell's IGP will support DirectX 11.1, a verson of the API that doesn't yet exist, while at the same time only supporting version 3.2 of OpenGL (the current version is 4.1, to say nothing of 2013). This is especially interesting in light of the fact that, of the workstation applications Intel lists on the above slide, the OpenGL apps outnumber the DirectX ones.
Haswell, a "tock" in Intel's "tick-tock" strategy, will succeed Ivy Bridge when it debuts in 2013.
Source: X-bit Labs