We are no stranger to Intel’s Iris Pro, when back in October 2013, they held a tournament during New York Comic Con featuring the Intel Iris Pro integrated graphic chips doing all the processing and heavy lifting. The game was Starcraft II and ran perfectly without the help of any discrete graphics card. Thanks to the Intel Iris Pro, we have seen many thin laptops with very decent graphics performance, able to run games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, League of Legends and DOTA2 comfortably at low to medium settings. (As seen on the Iris Pro 5200)
Intel has recently announced that the Iris Pro will be integrated into desktops with a partnership with Raptr to help gamers automatically optimize Intel-based PCs for peak gaming performance. Intel’s Iris Pro will be coming with it’s latest and greatest Iris Pro 6100 to bring a 65 watt integrated GPU along side a majority of desktop CPU chips as well as Intel’s New Unit of Computing (NUC). The new Iris Pro will also get an additional boost from DirectX 12 (DX12).
Although, the Iris Pro would not be something hardcore gamers will even take a second look at, the usability of this chip is only limited to one’s imagination. How about Twitch-streaming at 4K resolution 60FPS? I know that our internet connection in the world cannot upkeep such an insane resolution at such an insane frame rate but it is a possibility — you will need a compatible motherboard, however. IntelQuick Sync has the ability to offload some processing requests to the integrated GPU while you are streaming or recording live gameplay, leaving your discrete graphics card to render the game uninhibited by any extra tasks. Another implementation would be to fix up a small PC and use it as a media hub, maybe loading in 4K videos or movies and playing it live into your home theatre.
Come on AMD, where are you in this ballpark?
