Ghost-like characters?

Well... honestly... get a system that doesn't use Intel graphics.

One of the basic problems is that Intel doesn't really have much interest in the gaming graphics market. Sure, Intel makes demonstrations at E3 and other cons showing off their chips running the latest games... in low resolutions and with the lowest detail settings. Intel's status as a provider of gamer-capable graphics is such that most developers openly mock Intel, and one of the big pre-selling points on Project Larrabee was Intel's aggressive approach in getting game developer input. Intel canned that Project Larrabee which once again sent a message to game developers that Intel just doesn't care about graphics.

Another basic problem is that not all of the Intel Branded hardware is actually Intel hardware. In many cases the graphics hardware is designed by Imagination Technologies.

That problem is complicated by the problem that not all of Intel's drivers are written by Intel. In many cases the Graphics Drivers were actually designed by, and implemented by, Tungsten Graphics who are now owned by VMWare.

The Intel Hardware / Driver matrix is so complex that even Intel is on record admitting they have too many drivers for some products.


The problems with the actual hardware, and who-ever writes the drivers for that hardware, is further complicated by notebook vendors themselves.

Both AMD and Nvidia have taken to hosting chip-compatible bare-bones drivers for the GPU's that they sell to the OEM's and ODM's that actually produce laptops. One of the driving reasons stated by AMD is that notebook vendors weren't keeping their own drivers up to date. As many City of Heroes players have found out the hardway, notebooks with AMD graphics would often come with a driver that lacked any OpenGL support.

Case in point for me, I've got an Asus F3Ka. The laptop shipped with a RadeonHD 2600 mobile GPU. The latest AMD/ATi driver that will support this GPU was released on 10/22/10. The latest driver Asus lists was released on 2007/10/31.

Now, the reason why laptop vendors do NOT update their offered drivers is fairly simple. Laptop vendors figure that at some point you'll have to buy a new laptop and the more quickly your current laptop is obsolete the more quickly you'll spend more money.

There are also other factors. To a beancounter it simply is not worth the maintenance cost to continue to properly update mobile graphics drivers. Many of the custom drivers meant for laptops often have special hotkey access, special timings, or even special fan controls, that a generic driver won't support. In many cases adding the special controls to a driver can take additional man-hours and the actual product driver will have little resemblance to the reference driver.

In the Intel situation where there is a wide variety of Hardware, and a wide range of product drivers, some of which are updated and some of which are not, most laptop vendors simply say something to the effect of "screw it"


I, personally, don't agree with that sentiment. That being said, I don't know how to fix that mentality on the part of the laptop vendors. I don't know how to fix Intel's perception that drivers are not-important and there should be an easy and non-complex way for users to update their drivers without having to dive through one of the industry's worst software-download matrix's in the history of web-interfaces.

I honestly don't know what to tell people who have Intel graphics hardware and aren't in a position to replace it. There's only so much you can do on the driver front, and for the most part, you are either waiting for Intel or the laptop vendor to care, neither of which are likely to do so.