Intel Admits to G45 Performance Issues

A few months ago, I boasted that Intel’s G45 chipset held a lot of promise, and for good reason. It’s power efficient, powerful and can handle 1080p playback without issue. Or, at least it should. According to a new blog entry at Intel’s Software Network site, Aaron Brezenski admits to issues that are plaguing the chipset now, but shifts the blame to the software vendors.

Aaron stresses that the players used for the actual 1080p playback are lacking the appropriate optimizations, which, if true, is a little ridiculous since G45 has been feature-complete for a while. We even saw boards equipped with the chipset at CeBit back in March, so what’s the hold-up? The problem relies even with Intel’s own DG45ID mATX board, which we are currently evaluating in our labs, and ExtremeTech found it to score only 30 out of 100 on the HD HQV test.

If the players are what’s to blame, then fixes should be en route, but you might want to reconsider your G45 plans for now, unless you were planning to build a machine with a very fast CPU and beefy graphics card. Aside from this playback issue, G45 is still a great chipset, but given the playback is a feature almost anyone who purchases a board would want, it leaves little choice but to go with something else.

Despite all the problems Brezenski still maintains that G45 is the perfect home theater chipset. Intel’s inability to get its latest integrated graphics functioning correctly for home theater use — whether or not Intel is at fault — may leave many wondering how they’ll be able to pull off a more complicated discrete graphics processor based on Larrabee in the future.