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...formance_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.