Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC finally gets a vital graphics driver update – thanks to AMD
NUC owners have been waiting an entire year for this…
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Those with a Hades Canyon NUC – Next Unit of Computing, or in other words, one ofIntel’s highly compact PCs – have been waiting a year for a Kaby Lake-G driver update, but the good news is it’s finally here, albeit courtesy ofAMD.
Yes, this is a slightly odd situation in that Intel’s Kaby Lake-G chip came with integrated AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics, a partnership which Intel has since abandoned (of course, Intel will have its own Xe graphics solution for NUCs, and indeed other products, going forward).
So the story is that while Hades Canyon NUCs came out back in 2017 – to much critical acclaim, includingour glowing review– until now, Intel had left owners of these boxes without fresh Vega graphics drivers for a period of 12 months as mentioned. Remember also that Intel had previously promised to supply drivers for a period of five years, asTom’s Hardwareobserves.
But what has been pushed out now isn’t an Intel validated driver, rather the firm has simply allowed users to employ AMD’s own driver. In other words, on theIntel download pagefor the new driver, it simply links over to theRX Vega 64 drivers website.
Better performance, vital fixes
So those with Hades Canyon NUCs will be using the official AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2020 driver. Although that’s unlikely to bother anyone, as all most folks will care about is that they finally have an updated driver carrying a load of tweaks and fixes, providing better performance in contemporary games.
The fact that it took a year for this to happen, though – and the ultimate solution was effectively a fudge – might leave some NUC owners less than impressed.
Some of the fixes implemented by the updated driver are pretty important, too, at least from the reports we’ve seen (like being unable to playGears 5without it crashing using the outdated Intel-branded driver).
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
The brighter side of this news is that at least support going forward – provided via AMD’s official drivers – should run much more smoothly now.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
Trying to get the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU? It seems only scalpers have it and they’re jacking up the price
As if Intel didn’t have enough to worry about, Nvidia might be about to jump into the PC processor market
LG Electronics sets ambitious B2B revenue goal to offset declining consumer demand
