Intel 14.31 non-beta HW T&L drivers available

Intel has released non-beta drivers for their 965G, 965GM and G35 integrated graphics chipsets. They're touting increased frame rates and better compatibility. They've even put together a demo which shows Far Cry getting ~11FPS before the update and ~25FPS afterwards, making it much more playable.

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2007/08/gaming_on_integrated_graphics.html

You can get the driver here. It's only available for XP currently, but Vista drivers will be available soon.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...&OSFullName=Windows* XP Professional&lang=eng

 

So they made it. Intel's PR documents have been stating DX9.0c support in drivers by August 2007. And the release notes say hardware VS3.0, not just hardware VS2.0 as supported in the Beta.

My only concern is that they say they enabled a selection switch to change between hardware and software VS depending on application. I hope that's only for compatibility testing only and that it's hardware enabled by default. Needing games to patch to take advantage of hardware acceleration or requiring the drivers to recognize games would be problematic.

Now for some benchmarks.

 

thats good to hear,
Now some benchies please