Intel G965 is pretty awful

IT IS OLD news that the G965, AKA Broadwater is having problems. The latest embedded graphics chipset was unveiled at Computex to a crowd mainly glad to see that it had stopped raining outside.

The chip still is nowhere to be found, but luckily, early word from multiple sources is not encouraging.

It seems the last and more common stepping, C1, is a mess, with image corruption problems on top of the previously mentioned speed problems.

The current stepping, C2, is reported to put up the images more or less correctly, let's be fair, more correctly, but the speed problem seems pretty well fatal.

We are hearing that the chipset is actually slower than its predecessor, Lakeport/i945G. Much slower. Things get brighter in heavily shader intensive situations, but there is a problem there as well. We are told that if you go above 800*600, well, things approximate a slideshow, but with the added shader firepower, it is a very attractive slideshow.

The chipset's performance was described to me quite succinctly by one major OEM as 'it sucks'.

From what we understand, nothing short of a miracle will fix this chipset, it is more of a design problem than a bug. Basically, stick with i945G or go with ATI^h^h^h other solutions. This is kind of problematic for OEMs who want Centrino kickback money but also that Vista sticker. µ