Intel® Processor Graphics

Developer Documents for Intel® Processor Graphics

Intel® processor graphics provide the graphics, compute, media, and display for many of our processors including the 6th gen Intel® Core™ processors. Does your code use one of the popular graphics or compute APIs? Do you want a deeper understanding of our graphics hardware architecture? In the table, you’ll find the right documents to help you write and tune your software so it runs great on Intel processor graphics.

If you’re developing compute applications, the compute architecture guides give foundational reading and the OpenCL™ optimization guides show you how to optimize. If your code uses the graphics APIs, read the graphics dev guides or programmers reference manuals.

We map the Intel processor series to each graphics generation, along with the different processor graphics names applicable to the series. The generations of Intel® processor graphics architecture are nicknamed “Gen”, so for generation 9 you’ll see Gen9, and so on.

1. Parts named Intel® HD Graphics are available across multiple product lines.

Older graphics hardware

Older graphics hardware is no longer supported, and the newer documents tend to provide the best picture of software development for Intel processor graphics. For historical purposes, here are the guides for older hardware:

• Intel HD Graphics Developers Guide
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Series 4 Developers Guide

Other resources

Identify Intel processor graphics parts by name and processor number.

To identify graphics hardware at runtime, look at the GPU Detect sample. The code shows how to read the device ID in a DirectX* app and lists the graphics device IDs for the products shown above and more.

See how Intel® Iris™ Graphics can provide an excellent visual experience.

Are you developing on Linux*? Check out the Linux graphics documentation for processor graphics.

Do you instead need CPU optimization details? See the software developer manuals.

Download Drivers for Intel® Processor Graphics

Find the latest drivers for Intel® hardware including processor graphics at the Intel® download center.

Engineering Support

For more info about game development on Intel processor graphics, visit the Intel® game development community. There you’ll find useful references for everything from multithreading to audio. If you have more questions, including driver questions, head to the forums. If you can’t find the answer to your question above, you can visit the Intel® HD Graphics support page.