Intel's G965 embedded graphics stink - official

AMD SET UP a nice demo of embedded graphics for all to see and play with. The thought was that all the CPU power in the world does not matter if your GPU stinks. And, as we have been pointing out, the G965 does stink.

Let's be clear here. The G965 is not a gamer's platform, it is a low-cost, low-power way to get a livable amount of pixels onto your LCD. Do not expect FEAR to run a zillion FPS, or for Crysis to even run for that matter, it is all about the top 10 games.

These are defined by sales, and they are dominated by things no respectable gamer would touch with a 10 foot (~3.3M, use Google for exact numbers) pole. At last look, four of those ten were The Sims. And Lego Star Wars is a perennial favorite. They are a year or more old, way behind the curve, and sell in the millions just like the embedded graphics chips.

Last time I talked to Intel about this subject at E3, the i945G was all the rage, and it did just what it should, run a game like the above adequately. It fakes some functionality in software, on others it is a couple of steps behind on, but in general it is adequate.

The G965 changed all that. The performance was skewed toward shaders and away from the old pushing pixels up on the screen model. They aimed for more modern game performance at a cost to older games. The problem is the older games are what people are running. The newer games, where you want the performance characteristics of the G965, will not play acceptably. The performance slider was set towards 'why did you do this?' instead of 'r0x0R'.

How bad is it? AMD set up four machines, two desktops and two laptops. All were off-the-shelf major brand name machines purchased at a retailer. One was an AMD X2 4600+ on an NV 6150 with 2G of memory. The Intel box was a Core 2 Name E6300 with a G965 (rev C2 if you care) and 2G of ram. For cost, the Intel box at retail was $100 or so more.

There was also a similar setup with laptops that showed similar results but had an ATI chipset. The same problems cropped up on the laptops as the desktops, this is not a story about a single chipset or form factor.

So, what happened? The CPU power should be more or less equal, so how about performance? The G965 was abysmal, the first demo, Far Cry, had the Intel box struggling to maintain 15FPS while the 6150 had a more than playable 30+ FPS average.

The screen shots were hand captured, so they may differ slightly, but overall through the demo, the Intel box was consistently delivering half the frames of the AMD. In addition, in the hang gliding scene early in Far Cry, the frame rate on G965 dropped so low that it was unplayable and skipping all over the place. Keep in mind that this game is several years old and should be a walk in the park for these chips.

That brings us to the next problem, the Nvidia and ATI boards both have all the relevant functionality in hardware while the Intel parts emulate a lot in software. This has two down sides, it adds overhead to the CPU effectively showing it down, and on top of that, games may not 'see' the features right.

Remember Lego Star Wars II? Look at the screen shots below of the config screen and see if you can guess which one is Intel based and which one is Nvidia. This is a pretty clear definition of a problem, if your CPU is 10x faster than the competition but your graphics blow, which part do you think the users will say is faster? Which would you buy based on a store demo?

What happens when you put both problems, low frames and lack of features, together? You get a perfect storm. You have to crank down settings and frames to get acceptable gameplay. And it looks like crap. The other side can either have the eye candy or frames, and if they do right, both.

The screen shots from the Sims 2 below show this off in great detail. The G965 shots look like garbage, features missing, textures in low rez, and in general look like a grade school watercolor. The NV ones on the bottom look great by comparison. There was also a consistent error in the G965 rendering, it looked to be a texture problem, but there was a consistent texture popping that was noticeable and irritating.

What you are seeing is the whole strategy on Intel killing partners coming back to haunt it again. The more it deprecates partners and gives them strong disincentives to make good parts for Intel CPUs, the more Intel relies on itself to pick up the slack.

When it fails, like with the G965, where do you turn? Hint, you can't get a VIIV or Centrino kickback with an NV chipset, and ATI, well, they aren't really welcome in Santa Clara any more. Intel did more than set itself up for failure, it engineered it so success was impossible.

If there is one take-home message from the above, it is that that graphics do matter, and matter big. When you botch it, things are quite visible. When you botch it and there is no one to pick up the slack, you are screwed. As you can see for yourself. µ