Intel fulfills its promise, releases Windows 11 driver for long-dead Kaby Lake G with Vega M

Yes, Intel has kept its promise that it would bring Windows 11 support to its now-discontinued Kaby Lake G processors. Last week the company launched its new graphics driver version 30.0.13025.1000 for Kaby Lake G which now adds support for Microsoft's shiny new OS.

The new driver is based on AMD Adrenalin 21.10.1 which introduced Windows 11 support on AMD's graphics products. Intel has erroneously mentioned in its release notes that the driver is built upon the 21.10.2 driver but that's likely not the case since no optimization in the latter is reflected in this release.

For those that don't remember, Kaby Lake G with RX Vega M was an interesting product from Intel as it married its own Kaby Lake processors with Radeon Vega graphics using cutting-edge technologies like Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB). The parts offered much better graphics performance than what Intel could do at the time.

It was, however, discontinued by the company in October 2019. AMD's driver team continued to provide drivers for Kaby Lake G for a while before it too called it quits on the product support in June last year.

The new 30.0.13025.1000 driver also brings new feature support and game optimizations.

• Additional 21.30 feature improvements/additions delivered in this release
  • One Click & Auto overclocking
  • PlayReady HWDRM CBCS for H264/HEVC
• Driver optimizations to support following game launches:
  • Metro Exodus – Enhanced Edition (DX12 – RT only)
  • Resident Evil Village (DX12)
  • Far Cry 6 (DX12)
  • Naraka: Bladepoint (DX11)
  • PUBG DX12
  • Battlefield 2042 (DX12) Open Beta
  • Windows 11 RTW

As usual the new driver has a few known issues too and they are given below:

• Flickering with Radeon boost for Fortnite
  • This issue is not regression also observed with May P22 driver release. The
    issue is observed only when boost feature is enabled.
• Vudu playback error "Unable to start playback" is observed with P22 Intel NUC GH
  Graphics.
  • The issue is also observed without AMD & Intel driver, not identified as a
    driver issue.
• SWDRM is being engaged when played Netflix 4K video contents via Edge browser

Intel has also mentioned a couple of known issues from older driver releases which are not reproducible with the latest driver:

• TDR or sometimes system restart on closing Blender after "bmw27" sample
• Corruption on rendering blender bmw27 sample

All the five Kaby Lake G SKUs, namely, i7-8705G, i7-8706G, i7-8709G, i7-8809G, and i5-8305G are supported by this driver update. To download the driver, head over to Intel's offcial website via this link.