Intel GMA 3000 Performance Q1-07

[Michael]

The last time Phoronix had taken a thorough look at Intel's Linux display drivers was last October when we had shared our initial performance figures for the GMA 3000 integrated graphics processor found on the Q965 Express. Testing at that time was only about two months after Intel had launched their new open-source Linux graphics website along with support for the 965 Express Chipset. With more and more readers inquiring about Intel's open-source graphics offerings, we have decided to take another look at the GMA 3000 performance. In this article we look at the GMA 3000 Q965 once again and compare it against the ATI Radeon X300SE using the most recent open-source drivers.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=8834

Digg Link: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Intel_GMA_3000_Performance_Q1_07

[drag]

Nice.
I was wondering about this myself.

Still no barn burner, but at least the drivers are going in the right direction.

Personally I've played around with Beryl a bit on my little on-board GMA 950 and I was quite impressed with the performance it offered.

That's not to say it had impressive performance, but to say it performed well. With Beryl you have a 'benchmark mode' you can run it which will disable the fps limiter and show the FPS your desktop is operating at.

With moving windows around and eye candy turned up I got around 100-130FPS pretty much constantly. When moving the desktop around in 'cube mode' or playing DVD video with unaccelerated 2d (the 'x11' driver) then the performance dropped to around 50 fps or so.

So it's good for anybody that wants a 3d desktop on a cheap machine, like laptops and anything you use were you don't care about gaming performance so much. You don't even realy need to sacrifice any eye candy (except motion blur or water effects) to use Beryl or compiz with the GMA devices.

If the compiz/beryl/X folks can figure out a way to get accelerated video without visual artifacts and such then it would be perfect.


For my setup I use this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "intel video"
Driver "i810"
Option "mtrr" "on"
VideoRAM 131072
Option "LinearAlloc" "6144"
Option "UseFBDev" "false"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
EndSection


VideoRAM and Mtrr options give good boost to 3d performance over the default settings and linearAlloc will allow you to play HD-sized videos on your desktop with the 'xv' driver (normal 2d acceleration).


Also I am starting my X with the xinitrc file instead of GDM.. so I am putting this line in there:
export INTEL_BATCH=1

And that gives a nice boost to 3d performance also.


For gaming performance it's not the greatest, my GMA 950.
I can _barely_ play Nexuiz, but Tremulous works fine. Wolfenstien is playable, but I doubt it will be competative in busy online servers.




I am curious about the X3000 though.

Will the extra features of the X3000 (G965 chipsets) like Hardware accelerated TCL and shading and other such things give it a good boost in performance over the more limited 3000 at this point in driver development?

Also I am curious about the performance of games like Tremulous, Cube(orhttp://sauerbraten.org/) and Nexuiz. Makes sense to me to benchmark open source games with open source graphic drivers!

[Michael]

At this point in the driver, the X300 isn't too much faster.

Unfortunately with most open-source games they lack a good and reliable benchmarking mode/utility.

[drag]

huh.
I figured it would be the same it was for Quake2. You write a script to deactivate sound, turn on timedemo, and then run a demo.

I'll have to look into it when I get home.

[itaytay]

Hi,

I have just bought the very same motherboard (DQ965GF), with this graphic chipset (965Q). I was wondering, does anybody know if it works with wide-screen resolution, i.e., 16:10 or 16:9 ?

I looked in vain in all intel's documentation, and I couldn't find a answer.

Over the web, I just found one place, where one guy was able to use it with wide-screen on Debian etch. But in another place, someone said that not all of these chips support the 16:10 ratio. So what is the right answer?

Does anyone here has any experience with that? Will the xorg 7.2 driver support it?

Thanks,
itaytay

[Michael]

Not sure off hand about widescreen.

The GMA 3000 works with X.Org 7.2.

[itaytay]

Not sure off hand about widescreen.

The GMA 3000 works with X.Org 7.2.

thanks Michael,
do u have any idea where i can find whether or not it supports wide resolution ?

thanks,
I.

[Michael]

thanks Michael,
do u have any idea where i can find whether or not it supports wide resolution ?

thanks,
I.

Thinking about it I have seen an Intel Linux laptop that was widescreen, but I haven't tried it out myself. So remembering that, I think it should work.

[glussier]

Yes, the GMA3000 supports widescreen

[itaytay]

Yes, the GMA3000 supports widescreen

Thanks Glussier!
Can you please tell me how you know that? I mean, do you use it yourself (on linux?, on windows?) or, did you saw some docmumentation that says it does?

Thanks,
I.

[glussier]

One of my computers is equipped with the 965G chipset and hooked to an Apple 23" cinema tft screen under Fedora Core 6. So I know off hand that it works.

[itaytay]

One of my computers is equipped with the 965G chipset and hooked to an Apple 23" cinema tft screen under Fedora Core 6. So I know off hand that it works.

Yes, but I would like to knwo if the 965Q chipset works with wide-screen...

I already saw somewhere in Intel's docs that the 965G supports wide-screen.

Thanks,
Itai.

[drag]

Yes, but I would like to knwo if the 965Q chipset works with wide-screen...

Ya sure it does.

Why not?

The question is weither or not it supports it in Linux, which is a tougher question.

Essentially you have this problem were under linux these Intel cards can't do anything but bog-standard VESA resolutions.

VESA is a standard for video displays, just has the most generic sort of features enabled. No hardware acceleration, no fancy resolutions, nothing wonderfull. These standards are why you can still use DOS to display output on modern computers and your BIOS can display it's configuration screen on any hardware.

Think of it as a lowest common denominator.

Now under Linux you can use a lot of the hardware acceleration aviable with these cards, however your still generally restricted to the VESA resolutiosn.

With my video card I can enable these extras with a hack program called 915resolution.

With this I can swap out one of the generic resolutions for my custom one. So if I had a widescreen monitor I'd use that to enable it.

But with your video card the 915resolution hack won't work.

Instead Intel and X hackers are working on a more correct solution that will solve this problem for Linux.


I don't know how far it's progressed though. You might be stuck with standard resolutions for the time being.

[drag]

I've been playing around with driver settings.

Here is something I've found out...
You have your AGP size aviable by default. Out of this you can divide it up between VideoRAM and AperTexSize.

For instance on my 945g card I can allocate up to 256 megs of ram for the video card.

For example:
$ dmesg |grep AGP
agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xd0000000

However if I try to allocate all the aviable ram, or very close to the ram then X will start and corrupt the screen. I can still switch back to the console to reboot, but I can't see anything that is going on.

Note that can easily be completely wrong about this.

So these settings have given me the best performance so far:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel"
Driver "i810"
Option "PageFlip" "on"
VideoRAM 131072
Option "AperTexSize" "100000"
EndSection

In the future as X and Mesa folks get the memory management stuff together then this will be unnessicary.

[itaytay]

Ya sure it does.

Why not?

The question is weither or not it supports it in Linux, which is a tougher question.

Essentially you have this problem were under linux these Intel cards can't do anything but bog-standard VESA resolutions.

VESA is a standard for video displays, just has the most generic sort of features enabled. No hardware acceleration, no fancy resolutions, nothing wonderfull. These standards are why you can still use DOS to display output on modern computers and your BIOS can display it's configuration screen on any hardware.

Think of it as a lowest common denominator.

Now under Linux you can use a lot of the hardware acceleration aviable with these cards, however your still generally restricted to the VESA resolutiosn.

With my video card I can enable these extras with a hack program called 915resolution.

With this I can swap out one of the generic resolutions for my custom one. So if I had a widescreen monitor I'd use that to enable it.

But with your video card the 915resolution hack won't work.

Instead Intel and X hackers are working on a more correct solution that will solve this problem for Linux.


I don't know how far it's progressed though. You might be stuck with standard resolutions for the time being.

Thanks for your reply drag.

But again, I must insist, how do you know that Q965 supports wide-screen resolution? "Why not" - is not a good enough answer... After all, I didn't see anywhere in Intel's site that this chip supports wide-screen, whereas I could see explicitly that G965 supports it.

Did u ever see a machine with Q965 that works with wide-screen ? (Either with Windows or with Linux)?

With 915resolution, using the latest ubuntu feisty, I didn't see any wide-screen modes. I have yet to try the xorg 7.2 debs, which should contain support for Q965. After trying these I will post the results here.

I.

[itaytay]

I asked Intel support about it, and shortly after they responded that wide-screen resolution is indeed supported in the Q965 chip. Now all that is left is to find out how well it is supported in the new xorg 7.2 driver.

I.

[Caesar]

Yes, guys, g965 indeed supports wide screens

It works without problems on windows XP.

The problem with wide screen resolutions on linux is in i810 drivers, that receives supported resolutions list from bios and someone in intel was too lazy to fill more possible resolutions (like widescreens).

It is problem for older chipsets also, but 965 is the latest and not yet supported by 915resolution utility or X.org itself.

There is a patch for 915resolution somewhere on the web, but it is not works for me: i have true 1440x900 desktop bot still non-widescreen display and need to scroll desctop to se the whole contents.

if anyone have had any success with patched 915 resolutions please tell me how you got it working? (-:

915resolkution: http://www.geocities.com/stomljen/
patch: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-October/018926.html