Reply With QuoteI think you start to see all kinds of weird behavior from the drivers when the framerates aren't even regularly hitting 30. It comes down to the overhead costs associated, which, on actually capable hardware (e.g. a discrete ATI/Nvidia from the past 5 years), are made negligible because the fill rate of the card is enough to keep up with the game.
I think the conclusion to take away from this post is not that the Mac OS X or Linux drivers for Intel graphics suck. The conclusion is that the Intel 945 graphics chipset sucks. Immensely.
I have one in a ThinkPad with twice as much RAM as your Mac, and trust me, it is no better on Windows 7. IE 9 is unusable with hardware rendering, and still quite painfully slow with software rendering. Only Chrome is fast enough to provide a reasonable experience on that thing.
I also have a 965GM chip. It's ... faster, but since it is based on largely the same tech, it's still underwhelming.
And based on the latest and greatest out of Intel, it seems like their IGPs still have no real performance to speak of.
My recommendation is, if you use such a tiny IGP, limit your screen resolution to no more than 1024x768 if you intend to do anything involving 3d accel. The squaring effect quickly makes these chips useless at a high res, not to mention multi-monitor. I guess that's why both my ThinkPads have 1024x768 -- they didn't want to push a higher res and risk that people would complain about the performance.
In other words: get a laptop with a low res LCD and an IGP, by all means. Saves battery life and your laptop won't be multi-monitoring very often anyway (if you truly intend for it to be a laptop, i.e. portable, i.e. not a desk fixture). But if you are thinking of getting any sort of non-portable desktop of any kind, for the love of god, go with discrete. Or at least AMD Fusion.
Originally Posted by Michael
