Intel GMA X4500HD

When switching to the latest DDX and Mesa drivers, the Intel GMA X4500HD had functioned on Ubuntu Linux. We had no troubles with the integrated HDMI connector and everything had "just worked" quite smoothly. We had encountered no problems running the Intel GMA X4500HD on Linux with this code-base -- the mode-setting had worked correctly and the mode was determined automatically, we had no problems with Compiz, the 2D desktop performance was great with GNOME, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org, etc.

For delivering the first quantitative results with the Intel GMA X4500HD we had used Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.4. The tests within PTS Trondheim we used were GtkPerf, SPECViewPerf 9.0, Tremulous, OpenArena, Enemy Territory, x11perf, and Urban Terror. Unfortunately, newer Linux-native games such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars or even Quake 4 had not worked with the open-source Mesa stack.

With the nine different tests we had compared the performance of this IGP against several different ATI Radeon parts using their open-source driver. No other integrated graphics processors were used in this round of testing, but we may be publishing some comparative GMA 3000 / X3000 benchmarks to the G45 in the coming days. We hadn't ran any comparisons against the NVIDIA GeForce 8200 IGP or Radeon HD 3200 IGP since those are both AMD processor based. The ATI Radeon graphics processors we used in this article were the X800XL, X1300PRO, and X1800XT. All three of these R400/500-era ATI GPUs had 256MB of video memory.

Rather than using the closed-source Linux Catalyst Suite with the fglrx driver we had used the xf86-video-ati driver with its Mesa driver, in order to facilitate a fair comparison. If you're using the proprietary ATI driver, expect the performance to be at least doubled over using Mesa. No fglrx driver results are shared in this article as this driver currently lacks support for X Server 1.5 and the Linux 2.6.26 kernel. This driver code was checked out from the respective git master branches at the same time and with both the ATI and Intel drivers we had used all of the default options within the xorg.conf.