Intel G965 chipset is old news now, but the best detail about it is that the integrated graphics, the part of this chipset is capable of supporting the new Vista sexy interface also known as Aero Glass. Graphics media accelerator GMA x3000 is a part of Intel's G965 chipset. In order to have Aero Glass running you have to own a graphics card that is DirectX9 compatible and supports at Shader model 2.0 or more and you need the graphics that can support 32 bits/pixel. Intel GMA x3000 integrated graphics is Shader model 3.0 compatible and according to what we have seen from giving Vista a go, it fulfils Microsoft criteria.
Another good thing about the G965 is that it supports Intel Clear Video technology. This is basically video processing technology that enables quality viewing and reproduction of videos. We haven’t really played with it so we are not sure how much does it really improve the video quality.
On the picture above you can clearly see that Aero Glass interface works. Top part of the window is transparent, although blurry, you can still recognise the icons in the background. That is what Aero Glass is all about.
Now, Vista performance rating tool is something that confused us far too many times. It simply does not show realistic numbers. For example if we compare the scores from the picture from above where Intel GMA scores 3.5 rating and Geforce 8800GTX scores 5.9. We wonder where is the logic in that. Older Nvidia cards get far less then 3.5 but are much better in games. How does that work? Aero Glass turned out to be child play for the integrated x3000 graphics module. We wanted to see how far can the module go, can it go as far as Far Cry?
The water is not perfectly rendered
The screen resolution 1280x1024 was the maximum we managed to get out of it. On the minimal graphics settings and with 18-27 frames per second we managed to wipe out everyone in the camp. This means that this integrated Intel will help you play but as you can see on the pictures above it does not really render the picture like Nvidia or ATI. Everything has a price. Stay tuned for more vista.