The reason why DirectX 10 cards cannot be upgraded to DirectX 11 would most likely be to do with DirectX 11 mandating particular features such as a particular level of precision in mathematical operations, that kind of thing is difficult and a bit annoying to back-port onto hardware that was not designed to work with it.
This would be the same as a particular CPU not supporting new features introduced by a newer CPU, sure the new features could be emulated (and may run not too much slower than a native implementation) but the CPU itself still will not truly support the required features. A similar idea might be the possibility of emulating SSE instructions on a non-SSE processor, sure you could do it, but it's a lot of mangling and would be a lot slower than a full hardware implementation.
You may well, with custom software, get a DirectX 10 card to look as good as a DirectX 11 card and to do almost everything in a similar fashion, but all the native features or extra precision that DirectX 11 mandates would be missing and in general I think the software/emulation layer would be quite a bit slower than a full hardware approach.
As far as I can tell, its caused by the installation of Catalyst drivers (e.g. atiumdag 9.2.0.0 via Windows Update).
This deploys a service 'AMD External Events Utility' set to start automatically.
When the PC next reboots it does something which causes cause the IGP OpenGL driver to fail to load.
You should be able to prove this / make a working system as follows:
- Install Windows 8 with a display connected only to IGP
- Optional: When prompted to reboot for updates, disable service 'AMD External Events Utility'
- Install AMD APP SDK 2.8
- Run
clinfo.exe
Although I just disabled automatic updates, installed Catalyst then immediately disabled the service.
Unfortunately while updating to the latest Intel drivers seems to be ok, updating Catalyst to later drivers triggers the the service again.
[Edit]
Have posted these details on the AMD forum, hopefully can find out a bit more about the cause, and how to resolve without a reinstall. I've managed to get my main system to go from not-working back to working but I can't rememeber exactly what I did.
Now that I've got one system running Catalyst 13.1 and the Intel beta driver the performance seems to be actually worth bothing with; LuxMark Sala scores were:
- ~2050 on the 7970 GPU
- ~2350 running 7970 and Intel HD4000 together
Best Answer
Left Click Start menu, Click on the Photo/Image tile that Appears in the Top Right of the menu, Click the image & it should bring up a pane on the right hand side of the screen. Then Click on settings and scroll down to hardware acceleration to enable or disable.
(Note this can cause unwanted side effects like (inverted video color playback)). in browsers and video player such as MPC-HC & others.