What do you do with a drunken sailor? Wait, I mean, what do you do with a chipset that boasts hardware Blu-Ray decoding, but stutters every 15 seconds and uses 100% of the CPU? Well, Intel has avoided having its belly shaved with a rusty razor by acknowledging that its G45 chipsets (their latest integrated graphics setup) are having serious issues with Blu-Ray playback among other things. AMD wasted no time in pointing out that there was no hardware acceleration going on at all, and ExtremeTech noted “anemic integrated graphics and poor overall performance.” Ouch!
I know no one expects superb performance from integrated graphics (a decent card costs less than $100 these days, stop being cheap!), but it should at least do what it says it does. They’ve fixed the Blu-Ray playback not being accelerated, but even on the Intel blog, the “bad” and “ugly” sections of the update summary are twice as long as the “good.” Want to have 7.1 sound, or play your Blu-Ray discs through a receiver? Broken. Constant stuttering? Still in effect. Come on, Intel! Your processor tech is unparalleled, but if you can’t package it into an end-user-friendly product, you’re screwed.