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Making their own contribution to this busy week of GPU and gaming news, this evening Intel took the wraps off of their previously teased new graphics control panel. Dubbed the Intel Graphics Command Center, the new control panel – or to be more technically accurate, the new app – is an effort from Intel to modernize a part of their overall graphics infrastructure, replacing the serviceable (but not necessarily loved) current iteration of the company’s control panel. At the same time however, it’s also the first step in part of a larger process to prepare Intel’s software stack and overall software ecosystem ahead of the company’s ambitious plans to enter the discrete GPU market in 2020.

Starting from the top, Intel’s Graphics Command Center is largely cut from the same cloth as other modern graphics control panels, such as NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience and AMD’s Radeon Settings application. Which is to say, it’s designed to offer a highly visible and streamlined approach to a GPU control panel, making various features easy to find, and overall offering a more user-friendly experience than the company’s current control panel. And while Intel doesn’t go so far as to name names, from their presentation it’s clear that they consider this kind of user-friendly functionality to now be a required, baseline feature for any GPU ecosystem; in which case Intel is (or rather now, was) the only PC GPU vendor lacking an equivalent application.

To that end, the company is launching the new Graphics Command Center as part of their efforts to better support their current users, as well as new users going forward. The Intel Graphics Command Center works with 6th Gen Core processors (Skylake) and later, which at this point is most Intel-powered systems sold in the last few years. The company calls it an “early access” release, and this is a fairly apt description for the utility as while it shows a level of polish and stability that comes with over a year’s work, Intel clearly isn’t done adding features to it yet.

But perhaps the most interesting tidbit about the Graphics Command Center is how it’s being distributed: rather than being bundled with Intel’s drivers, it’s being delivered through the Microsoft Store on Windows 10. Yes, it’s a full-on UWP application with all of the “modern” flourishes that come with it, and this is actually an important part of Intel’s strategy. Because Microsoft’s new DCH driver model requires drivers to be stripped down to the bare essentials and delivered in pieces – graphics control panels can’t be bundled – these sorts of applications instead need to be delivered separately. In which case, using the Microsoft Store lets Intel tap into the OS’s built-in software update functionality. It also means that the control panel isn’t contingent on the checkered driver update schedules of PC OEMs; users can always download the Graphics Command Center out of band.