We have earlier reported about ATI’s and NVIDIA’s coming graphics circuits that will be launched at the end of 2006 or at the start of 2007, where we for the first time will see video cards with support for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. It seems though that ATI and NVIDIA may not be the first to launch a DirectX 10 capable graphics circuit as information about Intel’s G965 chipset has surfaced, a chipset that will use an integrated graphics circuit with support for DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0. The integrated graphics circuit will according to the product presentations posted at HKEPC be well equipped overall with support for hardware Transform & Lighting up to WMV9 and H.264 video encoding. Feature-wise there is no doubt that Intel’s new integrated graphics circuit is looking rather impressive, which we have earlier heard rumors about, but when it comes to the performance things are not as well.
Accordng to The Inquirer the circuit will only have two pipelines with 4 to 6 shader processors, which is hardly much to cheer about. Both ATI’s and NVIDIA’s low-end circuits should be able to outperform G965, but on the other hand Intel is hardly known for offering extremely powerful integrated graphics circuits.
