14 DAY TRIAL // Intel doesn't make a big fuss about their drivers, at least not like AMD and NVIDIA. The developers usually make the release and let people and other devs find out on their own. This is just the case with the latest 2014Q2 Intel Graphics Stack Release, which totally went under the radar.
There are a lot of users out there with Intel hardware, not to mention that numerous Linux PCs use the integrated Intel Graphics solution as their base. It's not the most powerful that can be found on the market, but there is one thing that all Intel drivers have in common. They work much better than the ones from the competition and they are integrated by default in Linux distros.
Unlike other companies that build GPUs, Intel provides open source drivers (with a few exceptions) for its products. This means that Linux distros are almost guaranteed to work with most of the Intel hardware because the drivers are always integrated.
Now, a new 2014Q2 Intel Graphics Stack Release has been made available. This is basically a stack of packages that have been tested to work together. You can download each one separately, but they will eventually get integrated into the Intel Graphics Installer.
“The 2014Q2 highlights are: Broadwell support, Baytrail improvements and many improvements and optimizations on power saving features. The support for graphics and media acceleration is now fully functional and was validated on 5th Generation Intel(r) CoreTM processors with Intel(r) HD Graphics (Broadwell),” reads the announcement from Intel.
According to the changelog, full Broadwell support has been integrated, large cursor support has been added and it's very useful for high-dpi screens, the existing fastboot support has been improved, runtime D3 support for Haswell has been added, the UMS support has been deprecated, and a kernel option to disable the legacy fbdev support has been added.
Also, the Xserver can now work without privileges under the supervision of systemd / logind, DOTA lighting effects on Haswell have been enabled, the STE filter has been added to the VPP pipeline, the doxygen tags in libva have been updated, support for YV16 has been implemented, support for MADI on SNB is now available, and the scaling issue on IVB / HSW / BDW has been fixed.
The Graphics Stack from Intel is far from perfect and a large number of known issues still remain. They will eventually get fixed, but it will take a while.
More details about 2014Q2 Intel Graphics Stack Release can be found on the official website (props to omg.co.uk for spotting this elusive release).