Onboard graphics and 3D shooters

[0x791e]

First a little background: I'll probably have enough money this Christmas to upgrade my other computer (AMD Sempron 3000+) to a newer processor/motherboard combo. I'd like to strike a balance between power efficiency and performance, which rules out an ATOM or installing a separate graphics card.

My choices are either a motherboard with a G45 (GMA X4500) or a motherboard with an RS780 (Radeon HD 3200) because they have (or will soon have) opensource drivers. My question is, is either or both onboard graphics options able to play the more demanding 3D applications at decent resolutions (e.g. 800x600 to 1024x768) and frame rates per second (at least 24 fps)? The most demanding applications I have in mind are OSS 3D shooters like Sauerbraten and any of the Quake mods like Nexuiz and Tremulous, so I'd appreciate a real world report on the typical frame rates achieved when playing such games.

[TechMage89]

You're probably OK in either case. I'm going to guess that your best bet in terms of performance is actually the ATI chip with the closed-source drivers. That's for two reasons: the ATI chip is actually superior hardware, and Intel's Linux drivers, though open-source, tend to be considerably slower than their Windows drivers, while the ATI blob has comparable speeds on both platforms.

If you want an open-source solution, the Intel works *now*, while the ATI open-source drivers won't be up for high-performance gaming for quite a while yet (even the supported cards don't have all of OpenGL 1.4 yet, and they're several times slower than the blob for 3D.) This won't be fixed until all of the ATI cards are supported (the priority is to bring 2d and basic 3d acceleration support to *all* cards, then move the 3d up to more advanced gaming-suitable level of support and performance.)

[0x791e]

Intel's Linux drivers, though open-source, tend to be considerably slower than their Windows drivers, while the ATI blob has comparable speeds on both platforms.

This is news to me. I've always known the ATI binary drivers were faster, but I always thought the Intel X drivers, while slower, were at least as fast as their Windows equivalent.

If you want an open-source solution, the Intel works *now*, while the ATI open-source drivers won't be up for high-performance gaming for quite a while yet (even the supported cards don't have all of OpenGL 1.4 yet, and they're several times slower than the blob for 3D.)

Does Quake 3 qualify as high-performance already? I always thought that none of the open-source games were considered especially demanding on hardware, at least when the advanced features of the graphics driver are disabled.

[chaos386]

This is news to me. I've always known the ATI binary drivers were faster, but I always thought the Intel X drivers, while slower, were at least as fast as their Windows equivalent.

At the moment, the Intel drivers are extra slow, depending on what distro you have. I'm using the G43 chipset with Ubuntu 8.10, and a quick test of Sauerbraten was all over the place. Depending on which direction I was looking, it was either 2 fps or 60, and was pretty much unplayable. Fedora 10 seemed to be faster (glxgears was ~1500 fps instead of ~550), but I haven't played around with it much to be sure.

The good news is that the slowness is due to Intel making a lot of changes with their driver recently, and things will be much faster with lots of nice goodies, soon (KMS, DRI2, OpenGL 2, etc.).

Choosing which chipset to go with is kinda tricky. The HD 3200 is much faster than the X4500, but you'll have to go with the binary blob. The X4500 has open source acceleration now, but it's slow, and by the time things are all tidied up, there will probably be open source 2D/3D accel for the 3200 (but who knows how fast it'll be?). If you want to play games today, though, the 3200 + binary blob is probably your best bet.

[Kano]

Well there is a 3rd choice, NV 9300 onboard. But you should not expect that you can new 3d shooters with it - the free ones for Linux should all work as long as you use moderate gfx settings.

[Duo Maxwell]

A 790GX mobo, it nets you the HD3300, the fastest possible IGP you can get. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...nd&Order=PRICE

This Asus stands out for decent cooling, all solid capacitors, and damn near every connection you could ask for, save coaxial spdif really. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131331
Reviews show several using it with linux already.

I'd go with boards from Asus, DFI or Gigabyte, Biostar is ok as well, I've used them a few times for low end builds. Never had an ASRock or ECS but I've used MSI GPUs before, decent, but not great.

I'd avoid Jetway and Foxconn though.

Thugh why the aversion to GPUs? The best of the bottom line doesnt draw much more power but it several times more capable. I'm talking about the non Turbo Cache / Hyper Memory cards, the HD4650 or the 9500GT, these cards in thei GDDR3 128-Bt variants draw little power, but still pack around 4-5x the performance of the best IGPs.

I'm fairly certain changing our PSU to a 80+ Silver standrd or better will net you more watts saved. Check Johnny Guru, HardOCP and other site with actually through PSU testing, I.E. not here. Phoronix really needs to step up their game...

You should also look into underclocking, get the CPU with the most cache you can justify, then underclock and under volt it, the extra cache will leave you with a CPU that is still faster clock for clock, great for laptops.

[TechMage89]

Sauerbraten isn't really playable on my notebook with a GMA950. Granted, the X4500 is considerably more advanced, but on my windows partition, Sauerbraten *is* playable.

For an integrated chip, Doom 3 is asking a lot. Integrated chips tend to be several generations behind, and have a hard time playing games. I'm betting the HD3200 can do it (it's the fasted integrated chip on the market right now) but the intel might be a stretch (maybe with the settings on lowest quality.)

The best option for gaming right now is to use the blob. The open-source stack is currently undergoing extensive refactoring to fix the performance/compatibility issues, after which it will be more suitable for gaming, but this process will probably take some more months.

[Melcar]

My notebook (Sempron 3300+, integrated 200M) can play Warsow, Sauerbraten, Tremulous, Alien Arena, at "low" settings with "playable" performance (8-20fps), while running the open source drivers. Performance nearly doubles with the binary blob. I'll see if I can dig up my old PTS gaming runs comparing the two drivers.

[0x791e]

I'd go with boards from Asus, DFI or Gigabyte, Biostar is ok as well, I've used them a few times for low end builds. Never had an ASRock or ECS but I've used MSI GPUs before, decent, but not great.

I'll probably pick a Gigabyte micro-ATX with AMD 780 plus a 45W Athlon.

Though why the aversion to GPUs? The best of the bottom line doesnt draw much more power but it several times more capable. I'm talking about the non Turbo Cache / Hyper Memory cards, the HD4650 or the 9500GT, these cards in their GDDR3 128-Bt variants draw little power, but still pack around 4-5x the performance of the best IGPs.

From my own admittedly unscientific tests with libsensors, there's a noticeable difference in idling temperature with and without the PCI-E graphic card. Without the card, sensors often report single digit Core Temp's (8-9 C) on an AMD X2 2500 GHz. With the card it's always double digits (12+ C). This is totally anecdotal and I don't know how reliable as a metric of power consumption. But more heat means more power lost?

[Kano]

Those values must be all wrong until you put the pc into a freezer.