Intel DX10
CHIP FIRM Intel will position its platforms, Viiv, vPro and Centrino of the 4th Degeneration all alongside one graphics subsystem - the illustrious GMA965.
Upon the news, we contacted several game developers and asked them for their thoughts about the new integrated chip from Intel.
Since all the company cares about is the size of the die, do not expect spectacular features or performance from the integrated part - although it does support Shader Model 4.0 and is capable of addressing 256MB of system memory - all that you will get is a two-pipeline GPU equipped with four to six Shader units.
Even by today's standards, neither four or six Shader units are something special - you can already find more powerful chips in stores - the performance of G965 will be way below the levels of the Radeon X1300 and GeForce 7300. While X1300 and 7300 do not have the feature set for the DirectX 10 API, the performance level of these GPUs is still way above that of the upcoming Intel part.
One developer of a DX10 game planned to come out in fall of 2007 told us: "We can all do a fallback to SM3.0 or 2.0 for slower graphics parts. However, the product has to have horsepower - judging by our previous experiences with Intel's integrated hell, we'll just spend more man-hours to make our game run faster than a slideshow."
All in all, ATI and Nvidia have a really good chance of taking a large bite out of Intel's lion-share of the worldwide graphics chip market - they need only make a decent integrated part to see chipset sales go through the roof. However, we do not expect hat to happen. It would kill their cash cows, the lower-end models