new to surface 4400 driver question.

[thremix]

So far I'm really enjoying the surface 3, much better than the yoga 2 with 8gb of ram. My surface has 4 and still runs much better than that yoga could. Anyway, inside that a new Intel driver foe the 4400 is out. I like to play wasteland 2 which the surface can, with medium settings. I'm wondering if the new driver will help improvements, maybe I can turn shadows on... is it worth the hassle? Will it improve general battery life? Since that seems to be my one and only complaint so far, battery life.

 

[Liam2349]

Intel claims a 30% increase to battery life - however, I don't think that's true for SP3. I got a little over 7 hours of casual browsing and metro stuff with the new driver at 50% brightness.

They also claim performance increases in gaming, something you should notice if you compare before and after.

 

[thremix]

I can't seem to install it, it keeps saying its not for my hardware... any ideas?

 

[mennogreg]

You have to manually install it. There are directions how to do so around here somewhere. Usually if the Intel driver is installed onto a Surface Pro, you'll get a performance increase at the expense of some battery life; it makes sense that the SP3 drivers released from MS as part of there firmware updates are tweaked more towards battery life and lower energy consumption. I don't know if the new driver, with its promised improvements, makes that tradeoff more agreeable. I do know that if you do install it, you'll likely only see a few fps difference; if the game was hovering around 25fps before with shadows on, the new driver may make it more playable. If on the other hand the game was really struggling with shadows on, the new driver likely won't have much of an impact. And I'm sure there is the inevitable WL2 patch in the pipeline to improve performance.

In short, if battery life is your chief concern, I wouldn't install the Intel drivers.