Here’s something that hits home for me. I am currently on a 1 month visit back home (I moved to Hong Kong a little over a year ago), and I have been on my laptop the entire time (a beautiful Fujitsu purchased in Japan). The thing is, see, that Intel’s integrated graphics adapter.. sucks ass. Well the adapter itself is fine, and could be somewhat capable in many games, but the drivers suck. It is actually quite capable, with hardware shaders and everything. However, drivers never enabled the shaders so the thing was running in software mode the whole time. I’d love to be able to play games on my laptop with friends while I’m here (even though it wasn’t purchased for that purpose), but it’s hard to get more than 10-20 FPS in games that aren’t newer than 3 years old. I realize that it’s not a gaming laptop, but to have the potential for playable framerates taken away by poor driver support is what bothers me.
Until today, that is.
Intel has released final WHQL drivers for XP that finally unleash the full power of the adapter. As an Intel employee gushes about on the Intel blog, it is actually quite capable of playing games like Far Cry, CoD 2, and Battlefield 2. They even have a Youtube video proving this.
We’re still waiting on mobile and Vista versions of the driver, but they are said to be coming very soon. That’s fine by me, I have had this page set as my homepage for the past few weeks. As soon as the new driver is out, I’ll find out and let you know.
It makes you wonder why they kept it crippled for so long.
Yep, exactly what Trevor Flynn said. The thing is, it’s easier to develop a new graphic card then to improve software. Maybe you know that capabilities of Playstation I were only 50% used when Playstation 2 hit the markets. The game developers just don’t have the time or patience to code the game and pull out a maximum out of hardware.
Same thing happens in different areas. Sometimes is good for the progress, sometimes not.
I agree that software development typically lags behind hardware, however if the claim is true it could be a real push for integrated intel chipsets (not that they have a lot of competition on that side of things right now anyway) but more importantly on laptops with the the G95. If people can use the cheaper integrated solution for basic gaming the less likely they are to upgrade to a unit with a Nvidia or ATI (AMD) based video card.
[...] 3 weeks ago, Intel released a driver for their G965 integrated graphics that, well, made it something other than a worthless piece of [...]