Microsoft to streamline Windows 11, Windows 10 graphics driver quality maintenance

Microsoft is streamlining how it measures and maintains graphics driver quality. The company says that separate audience-based measures for a single evaluation criteria is not needed anymore after a recent overhauling of how the company keeps track of driver progress. Microsoft uses three audience type measures: Standard, Expanded, and Ecosystem based on how the drivers are delivered on such machines. You can find more details about these criteria on Microsoft's official website.

Garrett Duchesne, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, explains in his new Tech Community blog post that such audience types will not be necessary for much longer as Standard and Expanded measures will fall back to Ecosystem measurement if the data is not sufficient. The change will take place sometime in Q3 2023 as the data will remain active for a while since there is overlapping of these entries with previous results shared with driver publishers and vendors.

Duchesne writes:

New Measure Dimension Capabilities

Historically, our telemetry systems required creating separate ecosystem specific measures when leveraging this audience type. [..]

As part of recent work overhauling how our driver measures are built, this separation of a single evaluation criteria (ex. Driver Crashes and Hangs in Windows Components

[...]

For the next few months these entries will remain active in the measure dictionary as they are reflected in reports shared previously with driver publishers. These will eventually be phased out in Q3 2023.

In the official blog post, Microsoft lists several ecosystem measures, including many kernel-mode (KM) and user-mode (UM) drivers, that will be removed from the measure dictionary.

Microsoft to streamline Windows 11, Windows 10 graphics driver quality maintenance