August 29th, 2007
Delayed & buggy integrated graphics drivers dog Intel and AMD
More than a year after the launch of the Intel G965 integrated-graphics chipset and closing in on the launch of the G35 replacement chipset, Intel has finally released production non-BETA Vertex Shader enabled drivers that support half-way decent medium-resolution gaming. These new drivers are only for Windows XP but Vista drivers won’t launch until the end of this month which should be any day now, but should it really take 7 months after Vista launches for a product that’s more than a year old? Intel argues that this is essentially a $3 GPU on top of the cost of the motherboard and looking at the prices of G965 motherboards versus non-graphics P965 motherboards I’d say $3 is about right. However, low cost shouldn’t ever justify more than a year delay on 3D acceleration optimized drivers.
It isn’t all bad news for Intel 965 drivers as the video playback was almost flawless on the HQV benchmark. But as good as G965 DVD playback and HQV scores are, there are still screw ups on some DVDs with interlacing (especially anime or hand-drawn cartoon content for some reason) and I’ve been sending Intel screenshots. When I tried to get official comments for this blog last week, Intel’s initial response to me was that they’re flawless on HQV and that my experience is isolated and not a driver problem. I didn’t care much for that response and I explained that this is a problem for an entire class of videos and they need to treat it as a driver issue because I can supply plenty of screenshots on my blog to prove my point from a wide variety of titles.
Intel eased on their position to “we’re still looking at it” so I’m going hang on to this issue like a pitbull until they fix it. I don’t care if HQV says they aced the test, they failed my real world tests on some real world DVDs. I will note that the current beta drivers have improved and the interlacing problem is less frequent than the production drivers so it’s clear they can fix the problem; they just need to fix it ALL the time.
Note: It’s not just Intel, the industry as a whole can’t seem to get the de-interlacing problem fixed and this has been a problem since the late 90s on certain DVDs. NVIDIA doesn’t get a free ride either and they’ve been giving me plenty of interlacing problems on their lower-end video cards. There’s so much computational power in today’s computers that I can afford to have my CPU utilization go from 6% to 12% if they’ll just get the darn image quality right even if they have to run a line-doubler algorithm.
Another problem for Intel’s video playback is captured HDV (1920×1080 1080i) content that I captured from my consumer-grade Sony HDR-HC1 camcorder. While it’s significantly better than an NVIDIA 6600 discrete graphics card in HDV playback, it’s still jerky sometimes. Intel says they can’t replicate the problem yet so I’ll have to put on my QA engineer’s hat and give them an actual sample from my camcorder. As HDV camcorders become prolific, this will become a bigger issue for consumers if they want to import their videos in to their media centers. Since the CPU isn’t even close to being maxed out, I don’t understand why it’s so hard to deliver some smooth HDV video playback.
On a related note, the BIOS update utility utterly failed to upgrade the Intel DG965WH motherboard. I tested both the Windows utility and the Linux-based boot ISO with a burned CD and both failed. The Windows utility rebooted the computer but gave an error message when it tried to update the BIOS so I tried the ISO method. Unfortunately, the version of Linux Intel used doesn’t support SATA based optical drives so I had to replace the drive with a PATA optical drive. Once I booted up and ran the upgrade utility, same error message as before. I’ve asked Intel for a fix but no luck there.
Intel needs to get their vertex shader drivers for Vista done as soon as possible and they need to address some of the remaining interlacing issues with standard DVD and stuttering issues with HD content. Once the new G35 integrated graphics chipset comes out, the DX9 drivers should be complete with full Vertex Shader support but the wait for the DX10 (DirectX 10) drivers begins and we may have to wait several months after the launch of the product. Intel would not comment on when DX10 drivers would be available, so the waiting game will soon start all over again.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
