AMD paved the way for much better looking UI for its graphics control panel, but it is not perfect. But when you compare it to the years-old NVIDIA Control Panel for GeForce graphics cards, AMD is in the future.
Intel has previously teased its upcoming Graphics Command Center, and now we have our first official looks at what to expect. Oh, and it's been released and is on the Microsoft Store right now. You can see in the above shot that the Graphics Command Center starts off by just looking great, with a bunch of different areas to click into from the left hand panel: home, display, video, system, support and preferences.
In the display menu you'll find everything you need to know about the native resolution, refresh rate, scale, and rotation of your display. I'm using the Dell UP3218K monitor which is a native 8K panel at 60Hz here in this shot.
The video menu provides a bunch of tweaks you can apply to your video, with color correction, brightness and other video-related sliders to play with. The cool thing here is that there is a real-time comparison video at the top, and the option to add your own video to see what it'll look like before and after you've made your personal tweaks.
There are also hot keys that you can set, as well as driver/hardware details.
Another great part are the online reszources which direct you to self-help support, a knowledge base, new graphics drivers, Intel support and the thriving community.
Intel has so far built out one of the most community driven efforts in the graphics card industry, ever. NVIDIA has a sprawling community, but they've had GeForce cards on the market for decades compared to the decades it has been since Intel released a graphics card. I was there, I had one - the Intel i740 and I played countless hours of Trespasser at the time, which had some great optimizations for the i740.
But those decades have passed and now Intel is ramping up to a graphics card family that will continue into the coming decades, something the now countless members of Radeon Technologies Group staff at Intel could've built at AMD, but now have much more resources and new-found energy at Intel. It is incredibly exciting to see happen, and now I'm just disappointed I didn't get to feel the energy in-person at the Odyssey event.
I'm looking forward to future events going forward, because if the Odyssey event is anything to go by, we're in for one heck of a ride with Intel Graphics.