Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don’t have much to worry about.
Intel already moving their 14th Gen “Raptor Lake” processors’ integrated graphics over to their legacy software support model comes as a bit of a surprise. The Core i9 14900K and other Raptor Lake S processors launched just shy of two years ago. Their legacy announcement spells out all of the Tigerlake through Raptor Lake and DG1 graphics now under their legacy driver support model.
“As of September 19, 2025, Intel will be moving 11th – 14th Gen Intel Processor Graphics and related Intel Atom®, Pentium®, and Celeron® processor graphics to a legacy software support model. Intel will provide software support for affected products on critical fixes and security vulnerabilities only. Software updates for these products will move to a quarterly release cadence with additional critical releases as needed.”
But as is typical with the upstream open-source graphics drivers within the Linux kernel and Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, there isn’t much to worry about. Those older generations of Intel graphics continue to be found in the latest upstream code — including pre-Tigerlake graphics that were previously punted over to the legacy branch… Many year old Intel integrated graphics continue to work with the latest upstream Linux kernel and Mesa. Just as old AMD (and even back to the ATI era) graphics continue to work fine too on Linux with the upstream Linux kernel and Mesa.
Intel developers may not invest as much time/resources into enhancing older generations of hardware support but the code remains open-source and upstream and welcome to community contributions. The only potential caveat for Linux users is with the Intel Compute Runtime if using OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero. There Intel previously moved Broadwell through Ice Lake over to a legacy code branch for the Compute Runtime code. We’ll see if an upcoming Intel Compute Runtime release for Linux ends up moving Raptor Lake and older to a legacy branch too, but again that’s only if caring about OpenCL or Level Zero compute. For OpenCL there is also the Rusticl option within Mesa.
