Intel GMA X3000

[colo]

Hello there,

I've been looking for a free as in speech solution for state of the art 3D-graphics for quite some time now, and Intel's newest offering seems promising. I've however failed to dig up some info about whether Intel is going to provide drivers for the latest GMA graphics adapter series licensed under the GNU GPL, or if they are pursuing a proprietary approach for the X3000 series. Has anyone gained insights on that matter as of yet?

Please feel free to post anything else related to the new GMA in here, as well

[1c3d0g]

...you know, due to Intel licensing the GPU tech from Imagination Technologies, I doubt they'll be able to provide Open Source drivers. But you never know.

On another note, I really wish that the new GPU will perform well, 'cause frankly, I'm tired of dealing with Intel's horrible IGP performance.

[colo]

Yes, it's the 3rd party "Intellectual Property" (note the quotes) that#s worrying me, too. But maybe Intel can put enough weight behind its possible demands (and my certain wishes ).

If not, I just won't buy their products any more. Easy as that.

[Svartalf]

Yes, it's the 3rd party "Intellectual Property" (note the quotes) that#s worrying me, too. But maybe Intel can put enough weight behind its possible demands (and my certain wishes ).

If not, I just won't buy their products any more. Easy as that.

I guess that it's not a big issue any longer- they provided open source drivers and apparently the needed tech info for the X3000 GPU yesterday.

I'm hopeful that this GPU will do better in regards to things 3D and will prompt other vendors to follow suit.

[1c3d0g]

Colo: congrats, now your wish has come true.

[colo]

Yeah, the board's already ordered

A pity though there are some hooks left in for proprietary code to enter kernel-space... some b$ about CSS and/or Macrovision for MPEG2-on-DVD-accel (or so... did not care that much, as all GL-specific stuff is free as in speech ) required this, from what I've read.

[Michael]

colo, how is the board running?

Just ordered an Intel GMA 3000 board for running a couple tests.

[niniendowarrior]

I hope to see some benchmarks soon.

Always wondered how non-nV,non-ATi Linux drivers fare.

[Michael]

I hope to see some benchmarks soon.

Always wondered how non-nV,non-ATi Linux drivers fare.

Hope to finish up some tests by next weekend or so. We will likely compare them to some ATI and NVIDIA components as well.

If there are any specific tests or areas that anyone has special interest in seeing numbers on, please report them asap.

[drag]

Hope to finish up some tests by next weekend or so. We will likely compare them to some ATI and NVIDIA components as well.

If there are any specific tests or areas that anyone has special interest in seeing numbers on, please report them asap.

Great! I've been looking forward to something like that for a long time.

I've given up on propriatory drivers in Linux and right now Intel is the only company providing open source drivers for their video cards. Right now I have a GMA 950 card and am ok happy with it. It's only realy able to handle games up to 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein'-style complexity. I'm hoping that the X3000 will provide better performance then the GMA 950.

One of the things you probably need to do is contact the folks at http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ and find out on the status of the current drivers and tweaks to get the best performance. I'd bet they'd love to work with you on this subject.

For instance with the GMA 950 with cvs drivers I found that running games with 'export INTEL_BATCH=1' nearly doubled 3d performance in some cases. Also specifing the amount of VideoRam and other tweaks shown noticable performance impact. Also check out driconf which is a gui python app for controlling DRI configuration options. You can do it for general configurations or you can specify options for specific games.

The major 'selling point' for the X3000 is the fact that it's ability to handle hardware accelerated features that were software rendered with older Intel graphics. Such as shaders, vector, antiscopic filtering etc etc.

I would be very interested on how much of these new hardware features are currently supported by CVS drivers and what they plan on supporting in the future. Also about what sort of things they have in that binary-only add-on for the drivers. (macrovision support?)

Also find out a bit about their programmable graphics core and ask about how well the on-the-fly pipelines changing from texture pipelines to vector pipelines, etc etc. I don't realy understand about how all that realy applies to this video card, maybe your curious about it too?

Maybe check out:
http://www.intel.com/products/chipse...0whitepaper%22

Also exploring AIGLX would be interesting and current driver's support for it.

I have X800 video card with Free software DRI/DRM r300 drivers from Mesa's CVS stuff. With that I have AIGLX enabled and I am able to play games and use apps remotely using X over ssh, just for a lark. So a lot at the difference in accelerated indirect rendering vs accelerated direct rendering.

Used Blender over wireless. Played Xmoto over wireless. Played Quetoo (optimized Quake2) over wireless (10Mb was to slow, but 54Mb seemed 'ok' with only noticable mouse lag over the busier scenes). On gigabit ethernet I was able to play 1600x1200 resolution for 'RTCW' over ssh and it worked pretty well. Ranged from 10-60 fps at highest quality settings.