Intel GMA 3000 Performance Q1'07

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. Our original article can be read here. 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.

Before we begin there are a few additional notes to pass along. Keith Packard had spoken at Linux.Conf.Au earlier this year and in the future they hope to be able to provide same-day Linux support for their new graphics hardware. Among the other topics discussed was Nouveau and RandR 1.2; Keith's session is available for video download if you had missed it. There has also been a slurry of news and rumors about Intel jumping back into the discrete graphics game. While nothing concrete has yet to be released, it looks as if Intel is developing a multi-core discrete graphics card. Do not get your hopes up, as this product will not be reaching the market this year. More information is available in the Phoronix Forums.

For today's testing we had once again used the Intel DQ965GFEKR motherboard and a similar setup to our original tests. This time around Fedora 7 Test 1 was used with Rawhide updates as of February 10, 2007. DRM and Mesa were also built from git on the same day.

The benchmarks being used for today's testing was Enemy Territory and Unreal Tournament 2004. For comparing the performance of the GMA 3000 we had tested an ATI Radeon X300SE 128MB on the same system using the open-source Radeon graphics driver.