We told you about the G965 and how it is basically broken ( here and here) quite a long time ago. The chip was officially launched in Taipei at Computex 2006, about 9 months ago. There were a lot of problems there, and most are still there, but the situation is improving.

The current war of words started when Intel was showing off the latest video features of the G965, something they say they have worked quite hard on, and working Vista drivers, DRM infections and all.

The demo was done in a hotel room across the street from GDC. I brought cake, Intel brought some very expensive nuts and a bunch of demo computers. The demo was a G965 vs an computer running an X1600 discrete card. My notes are 4000 miles away, so I forget the exact details, but both machines sadly had Vista on them.

The demo was the classic HQV video benchmark of a waving flag, the marketing message was that a G965, a "$4 part" was the equivalent of a $100+ discrete part for video. This is wrong, but more on that later. From across the room you could tell the ATI one looked like crap, it was ugly, jaggies all over, and skipping frames. The Intel one looked pretty solid.

To be completely up front, Intel said there was a problem with the ATI part and they were not sure what it was. Intel was claiming that they were trying to fix the problems but could not, a common thing if you are trying to set up odd hardware configs.

They were simply not trying to pass this off as the best DAAMIT could do, just that this is what they tried, and there were problems. Said problems were visible from across the room.

The message was that Intel had shiny new Vista drivers, they focused on video performance and Vista, and got the job done. There are beta drivers that fix the nigh unending missing features of the G965 going up, and demo'd a few games with that.

First problem, we are 9 months into the life of the chip, and the drivers still do not offer the promised features from last summer. They were broken, are broken, and stand a good chance of being replaced by the X3x series of chips before they are ever working with non-beta drivers.

It may be fine and dandy that they patched up the Vista DRM for movies, but until the basic functionality is there, the chips is still broken. Adding new features before promised ones is not a good business model.

To be fair, the G965 has a decent underlying architecture, and it is a massive change from the older 945 based parts. The underling architecture so vastly different that it is taking Intel about a year to get DX9 drivers that work. This bodes badly for up to date DX10 functionality, but since that is Vista based, if you are dumb enough to install that OS with the attendant malware, you deserve what you get, working drivers or not.

So, the point was Intel was hand waving and trying to show shiny things to distract from the fact that the drivers don't work, and won't for at least a month. The demo was flawed in deeper ways though.

The message that you were supposed to take home and write about was a $4 Intel part was equivalent to a $150 or so ATI part in video. Two problems here, first, I defy you to buy an Intel part for $4, they tend to be irreparably welded to the rest of the G965, and that costs a pretty penny. By the time you add in the requisite Viiv kickback fees, you are talking boards in the $90-100 range.

The ATI X1600 solution is called Avivo, and it is a discrete chunk of silicon irreparably welded to the GPU or chipset it is in. The catch? Avivo silicon is the same whether it is bolted on to a top of the line X1950XTXTXTX or a bottom of the line X1300Castrati, and does not change when welded to the RS600/690 chipsets.

Had Intel picked a top of the line X1950 for $300+ or a bottom of the line RS600 for $60, they would have gotten the same video performance. If Intel picked a $80 ATI based mobo and put it against a $100 Intel mobo, the whole price performance thing would have gone out the window, but you would have gotten a Viiv sticker for the extra $20 or so. You also would have gotten working drivers from ATI.

That brings us to the controversy part. If you read the articles on it from TGDaily here and here, you will see it unfolding. As I said before, the ATI parts were not working correctly, and Intel did not try to hide that. They say they tried to fix it, and talked through a proxy to several ATIers in the hopes of fixing the problem.

In the end they could not. I grabbed an ATI person on the show floor and offered to bring them over to the Intel suite and fix the problem. Intel declined and said there was one more demo to do, and then they had to pack up and leave. Basically, it wasn't worth it.

Personally, I don't argue that the timing was tight, or that there was only one more demo, but in the interests of getting the story and demo right, I think Intel should have take ATI up on the offer. If you have ever tried to debug a computer you have never seen before over the phone, you know how hard it is. To do so with the full debugging data of "video quality sucks" is the stuff nightmares are made of.

ATI claims that the video acceleration in Vista is functional, Intel says they can not make it work. Both sides could very well be correct here. Vista is evil, so I can't install it and check, but the demo I saw was clearly not working, it was as if the Avivo stuff wasn't even being called. Humphrey from TG Daily says they are checking it out, as says Scott Wasson from Tech Report.

In the end, you have a demo of working video quality and DRM in vista, confirmation of broken DX9 functionality and a promise of a fix. That fix was supposed to come in an update in January, but was postponed to make the Vista video work. Not a good tradeoff if you are one of the millions who has bought a G965 already.

The demo was flawed in the hardware it chose, the comparisons it made, and the fact that they tried to demo a feature on otherwise broken hardware. I don't think Intel was trying to purposely break the ATI hardware, they sound like they had problems for real, possibly bitten by the Vista DRM infection.

In the end, well, they should have just waited until they had everything working 100%. The whole pitch of "ignore that broken stuff we have been promising a fix for, check out this shiny thing" does not work for me. I still don't know what the problem with ATI was, but that is for people who don't object to Vista DRM and malware to figure out. µ