Intel G45's Graphics Issues Under Discussion

It seems that Intel's "latest and greatest" Centrino 2 graphics silicon has some performance issues, which have been recently revealed. A post on the company's blog discusses the ability of the latest generation of integrated graphics to handle high-quality video streams. The blog reckons that the issue exists, although not at the proportions the competition (Advanced Micro Devices) states it to be.

As the chip giant is the largest supplier of graphics silicon because of its integrated graphics, millions of PCs around the world are to face the problem. Aaron Brezenski, an Intel product development engineer, discusses the matter starting from the beginning, with the "AMD Intel Mobile Challenge" video. "Our competition threw together a demo booth which stated baldly that HP laptops with the GM45 did not accelerate Blu-ray at all while theirs, naturally, did," he said. "It was clearly not an apples-to-apples comparison," he continued, stressing on the fact that no info on the type of the memory or on the CPU used is given.

"On the Montevina (Centrino 2) system, you'll see the CPU utilization gets pegged up at 95 to 100 percent, where the CPU utilization on the AMD system will be half that," says the person demonstrating the two systems. The fact that the CPU is highly used on the Blu-ray playback means that it will not be able to handle other tasks at the same time. Also, the video playback will be altered if a virus scan or other tasks run in the background.

Although Brezenski admitted that this is an issue, he also spotted positive results with the Arcsoft Total Media Theater player: "On the plus side, use of the Arcsoft Total Media Theater player yielded immediate results. Blu-ray CPU utilization on a Core 2 Duo was lower than 20% on all material: a clear indication that hardware acceleration is working properly".

The blog continues discussing some testing made by ExtremeTech, "They, too, did not see hardware acceleration on G45 Blu-ray playback," Brezenski wrote. It seems that "they updated this a couple of days later with a correction... showing the acceleration working now, but a less-than-stellar benchmark (the only one they ran) remains: on the HD HQV test, Intel scored a paltry 30 out of 100". HD HQV means high-definition Hollywood quality video.

"While I question the value of some of the HD HQV tests when evaluating Blu-ray (a topic for another time), they are in fact valid tests. My sources... tell me that Intel's less than stellar scores are due to a player software issue: properly configured advanced de-interlacing will result in scores 20+ points higher. Still not perfect scores, but coming within the realm of workable, and my hope is that subsequent driver tweaks will improve this even further," Brezenski continued.