Intel Releases Next Generation Open Source Graphics Driver

The Intel Open Source Technology Center graphics team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of free software drivers for the Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. These drivers include support for 2D and 3D graphics features for the newest generation Intel graphics architecture.

As with any free software project, this release represents only the beginning of an ongoing commitment by Intel to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers. While these drivers represent significant work at both Tungsten Graphics and Intel—as our first release of this code—they're still in need of significant testing, tuning, and bug fixing before they will be ready for production use. We're releasing them now to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to providing free software drivers for Intel hardware.

"...in terms of open source support for 3D graphics,
Intel provides by far the best support..."
Dave Airlie, Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006

The Intel® 965 Express Chipset represents the first product family that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics.

We would like to especially thank our engineering team.

Following the release of this driver, future work will continue in the public X.org and Mesa project source code repositories and with this project Web site serving as the central site for users of Intel graphics hardware in open source operating systems.