TheRaven64's Journal: Intel Adds Vertex Shader Hardware Support

According to El Reg, Intel have added hardware vertex shader support to a number of their GPUs. Those affected by the driver update include the Q963, G965, 945G and the mobile GM965. Previously these parts only supported pixel shaders in hardware, and used a (slow) pure-software implementation for vertex shading. The hardware contains a mixture of fixed-function and programmable hardware; this driver update will use the programmable hardware to run vertex shaders.

The new drivers are Windows-only, but the existence of this functionality provides some hope that their Free Software drivers will also gain vertex shader support at some point.