Intel and Raptr Announce Partnership To Bring Raptr To Intel GPUs

Dennis Fong’s Raptr is a utility that has made a name for itself in the PC GPU space in a relatively short period of time. After pivoting off of their original designs to be a chat client, the company struck a deal with AMD in 2013 to become a quasi-second party GPU utility developer. As part of their AMD partnership, Raptr provided AMD with a branded version of their client (AMD Gaming Evolved App) and its game settings recommendation service, and more recently Raptr has added other GPU-centric features like GameDVR hardware accelerated game recording. The partnership has been fruitful for both companies, with AMD and their users gaining access to new software features and Raptr in turn getting promoted by AMD and included in AMD’s driver downloads.

Between Raptr/GEA and NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, both of the major dGPU providers now offer game settings recommendations and game recording through their respective applications. In fact the only PC GPU that there isn’t a similar utility for is Intel’s iGPUs, and this week at GDC Intel and Raptr have revealed that this will be changing.

Being announced this week is a new partnership between Intel and Raptr that will see Raptr’s GPU features extended to support Intel’s GPUs. This means that Raptr will be gaining the ability to use Intel’s QuickSync encoder for their GameDVR feature, Raptr’s driver update checking & notifications, and Raptr’s settings recommendation service will soon be able to profile performance on and generate settings for Intel’s GPUs as well. This deal essentially brings Intel up to parity with AMD on the utility front, offering the same features as AMD through what is fundamentally the same software.

Unlike the AMD partnership however there are a few differences, especially at the hardware level. While AMD offers a complete range of GPUs, Intel only focuses on the low-end with integrated GPUs. Which means that for Intel, a good game settings recommendations service is especially important because the lower performance of their GPUs means games will often require extra tweaking to be made playable on their GPUs, and all the while there is no significant extra performance margin to absorb suboptimal settings. It’s important to keep in mind just how incredibly large the Intel HD Graphics user base is, which means that any improvements Intel invests in here will pay off in bulk, making the reward/effort ratio quite high.

More broadly speaking, Intel also benefits from the Raptr service since the performance recommendation service is a continually updating service, offering something Intel and game devs cannot. Intel actually already does performance profiling for new games, and Raptr will be getting this data as well in order to create their initial recommendations. However once put in motion, Raptr’s crowd source data collection mechanism means that in the future they can adapt to things like driver performance improvements and use that data to provide newer, better recommendations. And with Raptr offering driver update notifications (something Intel’s control panel does not), users will be more likely to have regularly updated drivers that offer the best performance for a given game.

Meanwhile from a business perspective there will also be a few important differences between the Intel and AMD deals. Unlike AMD, Intel will not be receiving a branded application (GEA) and instead Intel users will be directed to use the stock application. Intel will also not be bundling the application with their drivers like AMD does. What Intel will be doing instead is offering the Raptr client for download from their website – http://www.intel.com/raptr – and Intel will also be encouraging OEMs to bundle the Raptr client with their prebuilt systems. This partnership means that Raptr will have a much slower rollout on Intel systems, but if the OEMs go ahead and bundle it then in the long run the end-user uptake could be much higher.

Wrapping things up, as of this publication time Intel’s Raptr site has already gone live. Meanwhile Raptr users should see an increasing amount of support for Intel HD Graphics in the game settings service as the service continues to ramp up its data sets.