Will Intel's G965 be any Good?

Not sure if anyone cares, but some of the features of Intel's next-generation integrated graphics core has been released. It looks to be a major improvement over the DMA950 featurewise. The appears to be full support for Vertex Shader 3.0, Pixel Shader 3.0, HW T&L, HDR, as well as various HW video decoding and postprocessing features. The fact that vertex shaders and T&L are now supported in HW means that Intel has completely redesigned their graphics architecture.

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=554771

Performance-wise, I think it will be pretty decent. We don't know how many vertex shaders or pixel shaders it has but since the DMA950 already has 4 pixel shaders it'll have at least that many. Some sites have even quoted 8. Vertex shaders will probably come in at 2 like other low end graphics offerings. It's hard to tell real-world performance, but I imagine any difficulty in shader efficiency could be made up by sheer clock speed. The DMA950 already runs at 400MHz and that's using a 130nm process. The G965 will be using the 90nm process so higher clock speeds probably between 450-500MHz are likely. It'll also have plenty of bandwidth for an integrated solution with support for up to dual channel DDR2 800.

Enthousiasts no doubt couldn't care less about it's performance, but it's nice to know that the low-end is finally catching up with the features of the high-end. This will give game developers more freedom and encourage them to fully use SM3.0 benefiting everyone. If Intel actually spends time optimizing it's drivers, it may even give the 7300 and the X1300 some competition.