Posted on Tuesday, August 23 2011 @ 22:30 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
VR Zone
heard Intel's upcoming "Cedar Trail" Atom was delayed due to DirectX issues rather than video decoding issues, as previous rumors claimed. Because of these problems, the chip's drivers will only support DirectX 9 at launch, and to make matters even worse the 64-bit DX9 drivers aren't expected to be ready until the end of the year.
As such Intel is only expecting to ship 32-bit DX9 drivers come November. Yes, you read that correctly, DX9, it's not a typo. But hang on; doesn't Cedar Trail feature DX10.1 graphics? Well, yes, the graphics core is indeed DX10.1 compatible, but Intel's driver team is not going to have those drivers ready at launch.
If you want to run a 64-bit OS on your shiny new Atom machine come November you'll be disappointed as well, as Intel isn't expecting to have 64-bit DX9 drivers done until sometime near the end of the year. It seems like the driver problems don't quite end there though, as in as much as Intel will have initial Wireless Display drivers ready for launch, these drivers won't support the latest features of Intel's Wireless Display technology and new drivers aren't expected until Q1 next year. Also not available until Q1 2012 is support for Intel's Smart Connect technology, a kind of data push solution which means that even if your netbook in this case is in sleep mode, it'll receive emails etc. which is a neat trick Intel seems to have learnt from the smartphone market.
