A small bit extracted from the release notes:
Enhanced performance in HEVC/H.265 video playback on 7th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors or higher
Improvements in the Intel® Media SDK (SDK), leading to better encoding quality across dependent media apps such as PowerDirector*, MAGIX*, and others
FYI: I still need to connect a screen for HEVC HW encoding with this new driver.
@Cornico yours is the old one I had before as well, release date was around end October/ begin November 2017.
From the intel pdf of the your (old) prior version I read:
DRIVER VERSION: 15.60.0.4849 (Windows Driver Store Version 23.20.16.4849)
DATE: November 06, 2017
I suppose the windows 10 automatic updates have a slightly different numbering scheme. Important is the last 4 digits (4849). If you do not wait for future windows 10 updates, but download directly from the Intel site you see they have a newer version available as mentioned in my post: 15.60.2.4901