Intel has been talking about native DX10 support on their IGP chipsets for some time, and despite of the fact support was supposedly built into outgoing hardware, the lack of drivers have held back such a feature. Demo drivers aside, Intel has been rather quiet on when they will officially begin supporting DX10, until now.
The company has now clarified their position, claiming that they will have a supporting driver ready by the end of April. Intel driver version 15.9 will provide with DX10 support to a range of current hardware that includes the G45, GM45, G35, GM965 and GL960 chipsets. The G965 usually used on integrated desktop motherboards will be left out from the release, though that was another product supposedly DX10 compliant on hardware.
Although Intel integrated graphics are still very limiting for playing graphics-intensive titles, this could have been a bigger issue if DX10 games were more common today. The fact that the latest DirectX is Vista only, has basically pushed developers to code with DX9 on mind. As for the future, we hope Intel and the rest of members of the PC Gaming Alliance take their intentions at heart. Decent performing IGPs before the end of the year could be a great start.