Intel is making GPUs even less necessary with Iris Pro

The main reason why the GPU market is so much smaller than the CPU market is that most CPUs, especially those made by Intel, already have video cards built in that are strong enough to handle pretty much anything aside from heavy gaming. Intel wants to further smash the GPU market by making its integrated videos even more powerful than they already are, making dedicated GPUs even less necessary. 

Intel graphics integrated inside the company’s computer processors power the vast majority of all PCs, and now Intel has brought its most powerful version—Iris Pro—to both the desktop and to a new NUC. Intel also announced a partnership with Raptr to help gamers automatically optimize Intel-based PCs for peak gaming performance. Intel’s graphics may be looked down upon by companies like AMD or Nvidia, but they’re the baseline graphics for most PCs. And as they get more and more powerful, even cheaper PCs can play more and more games. According to Chris Silva, the Intel director for premium notebooks, about 70 percent of all PCs use integrated graphics. Three million users per month are now downloading drivers from Intel’s Web site. “We’re really getting to levels of performance enabling rich levels of gaming,” Silva said.