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DirectX 12 applications no longer working on 4th gen Intel processor graphics
- footlose_3815 5y agoengineering obsolescence?
- nynx 5y agoLmao. Intel just can't catch a break.
- PaulHoule 5y agoIntel has been a spoiler in the GFX market for the longest time. Every laptop I've had that has discrete GFX has had recurring bugs with both Firefox and Chrome because of the two-GPU situation. I would have the hardest time documenting what was going on, they'd fix the bug, then in the next major release it would break again.
- distantsounds 5y agoMS just gave everyone with a 4th gen proc another reason to open their wallets for something newer.
- bserge 5y agoLol, I'm on a 4th gen because my wallet is empty. But I like to think that it's because performance improvements up to 8th gen were pathetic.
- pjmlp 5y agoBasically the way Intel got to fix a security vulnerability was to disable DirectX 12 support, great move. /s
- Scharkenberg 5y agoYeah, it's a questionable move. However, those who care more about DX12 on Haswell iGPUs than about the risk coming from the patched vulnerability have the option of staying on the previous driver, at least. The way I see it is that the writing has been on the wall for pre-Skylake iGPUs ever since Intel refused to make DCH drivers for them. Ultimately, even the (U)HD series seems to be a stopgap that is lasting longer than Intel wishes it did.
- bcwarner 5y agoThat's an interesting way to resolve an exploit like that, what would have necessitated disabling DirectX 12 in its entirety as opposed to other methods?
- atq2119 5y agoMost likely, a security vulnerability in the GPU's MMU that fundamentally cannot be patched on DX12 due to the increase in programmer flexibility that DX12 offers. Could be a race condition somewhere, for example.
- tibbydudeza 5y agoCould not be bothered to do a proper fix - Windows 11 and Alder Lake is the new thing. I am still miffed about Skylake being out of support for Windows 11.
- IntelMiner 5y agoAs I understand it, Windows 11's CPU limits are designed for CPU's that have specific hardware mtigiation for Spectre and Meltdown Given that we're still seeing new variants of those today it doesn't feel like the most crushing requirement Plus there's frankly nothing "compelling" about Windows 11 yet. All the promised features like SSD <--> GPU data transfers (mimicing the Xbox One and PS5) are just "things we're going to add" at some indeterminate date Microsoft has by their own clock until 2025 to wow people over to Windows 11, and they've not even shown up to the race
- tehbeard 5y agoDidn't DirectStorage get it's Win11 exclusivity removed? and it'll be on Win10 as well?
- NullPrefix 5y agoThey finally fully mitigated Spectre and Meltdown?
- nightski 5y agoThis doesn't impact many people, but WiFi 6e support on the 6Ghz band is currently only in Win 11 (won't work on Win 10, I've tried). Otherwise I pretty much agree with you, nothing that compelling.
- ranger_danger 5y agoThere is no technical reason a 6E driver for Win10 cannot be written by someone.
- jasonjayr 5y ago
- mrtweetyhack 5y agoThis is not good Intel. Are you going to deprecate Windows next? Linux?
- amiga-workbench 5y agoThe Intel graphics drivers for Linux are open source. If they pull a blinder like that, it can be undone.
- pjmlp 5y agoPartially, the microcode certainly isn't.
- userbinator 5y agoescalation of privilege IMHO that's on the very low end of vulnerabilities to be concerned about, but the paranoia-kings would rather disable an entire feature because of it. A sad reflection of what the software/security industry has become. (At the very high end is automatic remote code execution, something which I really hope a GPU driver would never have, but then again, I've been surprised too many times already... )
- monocasa 5y agoPretty much every meaningful exploit chain includes privilege escalation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yuliyp 5y agoWhen you can have web content interact with graphics APIs, escalation of privilege is a huge deal.
- thrower123 5y agoEverything about that sentence is awful. Let's just not do any of that.
- HKH2 5y agoNext, there will be Web DMA, then push notifications to your prefrontal cortex. Just make sure you're not using hardware with known vulnerabilities.
- userbinator 5y agoThen why wouldn't they call it remote code execution?
- vadfa 5y agoMaybe we shouldn't have websites talking directly to kernel code.
- monocasa 5y agoOof. I'd love to know why. If I had to guess it's related to how DirectX12/Vulkan/Metal/Mantle are all about the basic idea that if you have a full MMU on the GPU, you can expose a more direct, console like API. The idea being that at worst you can only crash your own process's GPU context and that was always allowed. Maybe Intel found a hole in their MMU's implementation that lets you break out from the GPU side? I feel like it would have to be some hardware issue that fundamentally break's DX12's value add if patched to decide to just wholesale remove the feature.
- kevingadd 5y agoAs a game dev "you can expose a more direct, console like API. The idea being that at worst you can only crash your own process's GPU context and that was always allowed." is extremely funny to me. Any time I test Vulkan code on my machine I make sure to save all my work first since if the code has any bugs it has a decent chance of trashing kernel data structures and causing a BSOD.
- monocasa 5y agoThe primitives being in place (virtual addresses in GPU data structures like the command lists, letting user space manage GPU memory) says nothing about there being bugs in the drivers or not.
- Jasper_ 5y agoIt's worth noting that Haswell only ever supported Tier1 resource binding on DX12, so none of the new bindless stuff would even be to blame. I suspect this won't affect any projects too harshly, because anything DX12 exclusive probably requires at least Tier2 resource binding support. But I'm guessing something in the resource binding system is to blame...
- breakingcups 5y agoWould this be grounds to return the product for a refund outside of the normal return window?
- formerly_proven 5y agoDirectX 12 is Windows 10 exclusive and that came out 1-2 years after 4th gen, so this would not be a feature Intel was advertising at the time.
- soniman 5y agoI had a 4th gen processor (i5-4200) and it couldn't render video without lag until until the OS was upgraded to Windows 10 with DirectX 12, after which it was more than capable of handling video. DX12 probably added a few years to the life of my computer.
- vmception 5y agothere’s a joke about gamers who avoid macs in here somewhere
- theknocker 5y agoMicrosoft and intel should have to mail me a new pc for free.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoThis doesn’t affect me, so I won’t comment on the decision or its merits/alternatives. But I’m astonished that in the same article: - they say that they removed DirectX 12 support to address a security vulnerability - they say you can restore DirectX 12 support with the older, vulnerable firmware … and don’t warn that this implies reintroducing the vulnerability. I mean, sure, the implication is clear if you’re reading top to bottom to understand the reason for the change. But it’s certainly not going to be clear to people who understandably may find this looking for a “fix”, where skipping to the solution is a common pattern. That seems exceedingly irresponsible to me. Security fixes are for your users, not for your own checklist to cover your ass.
- benbenolson 5y agoWhat do you expect them to do, instead? Simply not mention any alternatives? It's absurdly clear from the article that downgrading will leave you vulnerable, so anyone who actually cares is going to read the one (1) paragraph required to determine that.
- ars 5y agoIt's not clear except to programmers. Non programmers will assume the new driver version introduced the vulnerability. A hardware vulnerability is not in most non-programmers radar, they won't consider it.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI expect them to not explicitly endorse bypassing security measures they deemed appropriate to ship. But, you didn’t need to ask that, I thought it was quite clear that was my expectation.
- smoldesu 5y agoI was initially a little surprised, as someone running a trusty Haswell CPU, but then I remembered that DXVK handles all this for me and I probably won't be affected. Not sure if this is a win or a vulnerability, but I'll take it!
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoThis is a dumb question but how far "back" (regressed) would we have to go to get "open secure" hardware? ie we decide that having open sourced hardware designs and some way to verify the silicon matches tha hardware is the way to go. This is not just the CPU but all the chips on a motherboard, GPU included? IIRC Russia still fabs 286s for its military because they have verified the design and don't have to worry the NSA has added a few extra circuits. I would guess we would could go a couple of generations back before the reduction in power more than was compensated for by the presumed extra peace of mind?
- ranger_danger 5y agoRISC-V and MIPS are the only semi-modern architectures I know of that can be implemented with 100% open hardware down to the schematics of every single component on the mainboard/CPU/etc. And the main problem with those is performance. Even the fastest RISC-V board currently available (which is also proprietary) is still twice as slow as a Raspberry Pi 3.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oneplane 5y agoYou can use ARM but it will only be open to the people paying for the NDA.
- derefr 5y agoIs that “just” a matter of the process node used to fab them, though? What would the power profile of a RISC-V taped out for TSMC’s 5nm process look like?
- londons_explore 5y agoThey're still small slow processors. Sure, it's possible to design a big fast RISC-V processor to rival the M1, but nobody has done it yet.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jon_Lowtek 5y agoMust be a slow news week. Driver 15.40.44.5107 was released January 10th 2020. The bugs fixed disclosed some time later in https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00315.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi... People have been complaining about dx12 not working with that driver on haswell in early 2020 on their forums. And intels support staff responded with "that chip does not officially support dx12" https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Why-the-DirectX-12-is-not-working-on-newer-Drivers/td-p/721273#messageView2_1_6 https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Why-the-DirectX-12-i... Note that those chips are two years older then DX12 which was released july 2015 together with win10. edit: however intel silently changed the list of supported APIs their forum staff is linking. When looking at old patch notes, those chips for some time did officially feature DX12 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/news/new-intel-graphics-driver-for-windows-10-and-windows-781-1540224424.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/n... - with a small-print of "mostly but not completely". edit2: it seems intel was under pressure at the time to push drivers that fix game crashes in triple-A games on win10 on haswell. One more thing: the article linked here has a "lastModifieddate" metatag of 2020-11-04 - did they set the wrong publishing date in their CMS? hahaha. So some tech journals probably monitor intel for new articles and now they are copying from each other with no one checking if the news is older than moldy bread. edit: looking at SA-00315 i wonder if DX12 ever only worked on those chips because it gracefully overflowed some buffers edit2: mmh the big new thing in DX12 were low level APIs.
- dimman 5y agoSo DX12 support has not been deprecated in newer drivers (as the page states), it has actually been completely removed.
- djmips 5y agoSome people don't know what that word means...
- EastOfTruth 5y agoWhy is that reported by Intel? isn't that a Microsoft decision paid by Intel?
- londons_explore 5y agoSo is there some kind of emulator for these, or will an era of software become lost?
- pkpioneer 5y agoWhy PC Gaming Is Awesome, Even Without a Powerful Gaming PC? https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/11/why-pc-gaming-is-awesome-even-without.html https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/11/why-pc-gaming-is-awes...