At last. VIA have come up with an improved IGP for The C7-M CPUs used in UMPCs. This could really help a lot.

According to a report at Epiacenter the new VN896 will include the Chromotion 3 core which  enables DirectX-9 support. WDDM drivers are already available and you know what that could means don’t you – Aero Glass, Movie Maker and DVD maker support.

VIA VN896 with VIA Chrome9 IGP core supporting DirectX® 9.0 and Chromotion™ 3.0 offers rich visual Hi-Def™ experience for notebooks and ultra portable devices

Don’t get too excited yet though. Its still to be confirmed when these parts will be available and whether they really will get WDDM drivers but so far its looking highly possible [WDDM is confirmed below] The drivers might even provide support for MPEG-2 decoding which will help digital-TV and DVD playback. Unfortunately there’s not MPEG4/WMV9 hardware acceleration but the core should be powerful enough to support that on its own anyway.

But what about performance? This is a big unknown. Its certainly not going to enable gaming and I doubt it will be any better than the Intel 945 chipset.  Another negative point is that its not a combination north/southbridge solution so board designs would be bigger than with the VX700.

There’s no availability info and they will probably be used in low-end Vista notebooks before we see them in UMPC’s. This leaves time for Intel to get 945-based UMPCs out the door. This is going to be a fun race.

Update: VN896 display drivers are already on the ViaArena website (since the beginning of Jan!) and the inf file specifies WDDM.

S3GRAPHICS = “S3 Graphics Co. Ltd.”
S3GDeltaChromeIGP = “VIA Chrome9 HC IGP WDDM ”

• New UMPCs + Old Intel hardware = Customer warning.
• Blocked Vista apps will affect most UMPCs
• Via promoting VN896 as an Ultra Mobile Solution