The win drivers for G45 are much faster than oss drivers -w hen you compare for example Quake Live.
The drivers do not share sources thats clear. For win drivers 3rd party tools can be used to improve drivers but not with oss drivers.
For the obvious reason? They care about Windows since it's the majority of their sales, so they have a much bigger driver development team writing the Windows code, and it's critical to have performance not suck totally because people would then return their laptops back where they bought them.
Which of the following categories would put windows on his machine?
Netbook/Laptop users with build-in intel VGA - serious impact on security.
Server admins with build-in intel VGA - serious impact on both perfomance and security.
And polishing windows drivers, means they dont take opensource seriously. At least not to the point of "universal" driver with backends. I think its their problem how they decide to cfg the teams, but 6:1 performance is simply disgusting. It feels like a slap in your face, like throwing together a heap of bricks and calling it "house". And when I buy a laptop or i5 6xx, Im supposed to have already payed for hardware and drivers.
Wow, so I really get their hardware usable if I purchase and use windows. I get hardware supported if I support crappy software! This is the message, right Intel?! Thanks! Keep up!
Well I got a Laptop with Intel GMA 4500M graphics. Here is my games list
Native:
TileRacer - runs smoothly [High Setting Except HDR]
ColdWar - runs smoothly [High Setting]
Unreal Tournament 2004 - runs smoothly [High Setting]
AndYetItMoves runs smoothly [with & without shader]
aquaria - smooth experience with high resolution
Penumbra BlackPlague - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Penumbra Overture - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
steelstorm runs but jerky fps [High Setting]
WorldOfGoo - runs smoothly [High res]
Quake Live - runs smoothly [High Setting]
Doom 3 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res exept shadow]
Quake 4 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res exept shadow]
Prey - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res exept shadow]
X-Plane 9 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res exept shadow]
Serious Sam First Encounter - runs smoothly [High Setting high res]
Serious Sam Second Encounter - runs smoothly [High Setting high res]
Enemy Territory Quake Wars - playable without shadow
and many more
loki testtool says:
Graphics Test
-------------
Looking for OpenGL library
Accepting /usr/lib/libGL.so.1
Card detected as Tungsten Graphics, Inc Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset GEM 20091221 2009Q4 x86/MMX/SSE2
Direct Rendering: Yes
Card memory detected as 256MB
Card antialiasing level 0x
Card anisotropic level 16x
Card shader level 2.0
Wine games:
Call of Duty 4 - runs but slow like 5fps
Crashday - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Resident Evil 4 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Need for Speed Most Wanted - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Need for Speed Undercover - runs smoothly [High Setting 1024x768 res with shadow and effect off]
Need for Speed Underground - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Need for Speed Underground 2 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Hitman 2 Silent Assassin - runs smoothly [High Setting 1024x768 res]
Hitman 4 Blood Money - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res except shadow and post filtering effect]
Commandos Strike Force - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Need for Speed Carbon - playable [High Setting 800x600 res but with older wine 1.1.29]
FlatOut - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
FlatOut 2 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res except post filtering effect]
GTA San Andreas - runs smoothly [Low Setting 800x600 res]
Grand Theft Auto Vice City - runs smoothly [High res]
Max Payne 2 - runs smoothly [High Setting 800x600 res]
Prince of Persia The Sands of Time - runs smoothly [Low effect, Hight shadow with low water effect 800x600 res]
Prince of Persia Warrior Within - runs smoothly [low Setting 800x600 res]
and many more.
I am quite happy with this inboard intel graphics as I did not expect so many games from this card
System spec:
UBUNTU 10.04
Mesa 7.7.1 (with GL_S3_s3tc from libtxc_dxtn)
Intel 2.9.1
Wine 1.3.3
Pentium DualCore 2.20
RAM 2.9 GB
One Important thing you need which is s3tc from libtxc_dxtn Libraby
as Wine and many native games use it for texture compression.
AFAIK - Only Intel GMA 4500 and up got hardware vertex shader support.
Windows driver has a highy optimized cpu based vertex shader, where oss driver does not. And also from my experiment shadow operations are much faster on windows driver. Except that oss and windows driver have got almost same functionality.
it is very essay to prove, just use lightsmark on both oss and windows driver, where I got higher 1 to 2 fps higher in oss than windows.