Drivers for Intel Arc(TM)A730M GPU

[Calderon]

I would like to ask for help from this Community:
I bought, 3 weeks ago, the Medion Erazer Major X10 laptop with Intel Arc(TM) A730M GPU.
I read several reviews (from 2022 and 2023) that made comparisons between this GPU and those of the NVidea RTX 3060, 4060 and others. In almost all comparisons there were comments that the Intel GPU had "ups and downs" sometimes surpassing Nvidia's performance, but failing to maintain it and falling, damaging the games. In other words, it presented problems that could probably be corrected in the future through better DRIVERS.
Well, I'm not a game player and my total interest is in video rendering and similar things, which also require a lot of the GPU.
I must inform you that the manufacturer Medion is very bad at informing or providing information about their laptop, motherboard, drivers etc. In fact, there's no way to even get in touch. There is indeed a great Community that provides good assistance, even without any help from Medion, who said: "one day in the future", Windows update would probably update.
With that, I checked on the Intel-Graphics website that there are 3 driver updates for my laptop, including the Arc A730 graphics.
Medion has not updated the drivers on its website for about 1 year. and Intel's automatic check verified this on my system as well.
Intel, however, advises against using this update, as it may cause problems with the Medion drivers.
My questions:
1- Are there risks in using Intel drivers directly?
2 - I don't know how this works, but why hasn't Intel sought the update via Windows Update yet?
3 - Would you have information about these updates and whether they really improve the GPU?
Sorry for the long text and thank you very much for your attention.
Calderon

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello Calderon

Thank you for posting on the Intel Communities. I understand your concern related to the driver for your system and I can certainly assist you.

The tool that I see you are using is the Intel® Driver and Support Assistant and we do not recommend using the tool in other manufacturers' laptops since it is mostly intended for desktop and our NUCs products, however, if you use those drivers it will not actually "damage" the system, but as the warning says the drivers for laptops are customized by the system manufacturer and include feature or optimizations that our generic will not have. So in summary you can use them, however, if you notice any type of problem you will need to roll back to the driver version recommended and posted on your manufacturer's website.

Answering your questions related to why the updates are not published in Windows update, this is basically because your hardware devices are identified with a device ID also customized by your system manufacturer, so Windows will only update and install whatever version of the driver your manufacturer published and advised to install on the system.

All of our updates are published with the respective release notes in our Download Center, you can look for them by version, and you will be able to check all the fixes and improvements made by each driver.

If there are any other questions feel free to ask, hope you find the information useful.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[Calderon]

Dear Hugo O.

Thank you very much for your answers. They are very useful and enlightening.
Allow only two observations:

1 – If the laptop manufacturer (Medion) is not interested in updating drivers for non-recent models, the customer will be harmed, as well as Intel, for example, which will have its image harmed, unfairly, as a GPU manufacturer, for the end customer and for the market, since the majority will always judge that Intel GPUs, such as the Arc™ A-730M, would not have adequately competitive performance;

2 – Would it be correct to say that applications that promise to update PC and Laptop drivers, such as “Driver Booster”, “AVG Driver Updater”, “Driver Fix”, “Driver Easy”, “Ashampoo Driver Updater” and others, would be placing equipment at risk or, at best, would they only install what Windows or the manufacturer offers?
Once again, I thank you for your attention and kindness.

ACCalderon

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello Calderon

I am glad you found the information useful. Answering your questions:

• I agree that most customers would think Intel is to blame for outdated drivers from other manufacturers, however, given the huge variety of laptops available in the market is something we cannot control, since each manufacturer like HP, Dell, Acer, and Lenovo to name a few will customize their system in different ways with different motherboards, processor, ports and any other customization they want to add. This is why we provide generic driver and they need to optimize them for their system.
• All of the apps you mentioned mainly will use generic drivers instead of customized drivers, or they will install whatever driver they have registered as the latest on their database, however, most of the time they will be only generic versions as well.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello Calderon

I wanted to check if you had further questions related to this topic or if you are experiencing any issues with the driver that you need assistance with. Please let us know.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

[Hugo_Intel]

Hello Calderon

I see there are no further questions in this thread so we will close it. I hope all the information shared was useful to you in knowing what driver to use on your system. If you need further assistance you can feel free to open a new topic.

Best Regards,

Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.