Intel GMA X3000

[drag]

I posted this in the motherboard forum also, but with the G965-based motherboard and Windows XP it performed very badly in 3d performance.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/04/review_supermicro_pdsba_g965/

[Michael]

Not posted yet, there was some problems with the motherboard (Q965) and both Fedora Rawhide and Ubuntu Edgy Eft Beta 1. The benchmarks will be out soon.

[niniendowarrior]

I'm sorry, but it's either the benchmarks on the Intel chipset hasn't been posted or I just missed it... I'm not sure where it is, Michael.

By the way, I also skimmed a bit on the whitepapers of the 965G/GMA x3000.

[1c3d0g]

Interesting. I'm really looking forward to a big performance boost compared to the GMA950, which couldn't even play UT2k4 with all the bells and whistles properly.

[Michael]

Here is just what Keith Packard had to say:

As noted in the driver release announcement, this is just our first
release of the code and there remain significant possible performance
improvements that can be made. Some of them are low-level chip
optimziations, while others are ongoing efforts to improve the Mesa
project as well. Right now, there aren't any performance tuning
parameters available for the driver.

[Michael]

I had sent off a message to some Intel contacts, and am hoping for their reply in time for this article -- to comment both on the features implemented/not-yet-implemented and any performance tuning.

I have read the GMA 3000 white-paper when it was initially released as well as extensively investigating other areas of its architecture as well.

I'll likely comment on Compiz and AIGLX in the article as well.

I'm hoping to compare the GMA 3000 performance to the R300 open-source drivers with an ATI Radeon X300 and X800, and more if time permits.

[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/chipsets/gma3000/gma3000.pdf#search=%22gma%20x3000%20whitepaper%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.

[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.

[niniendowarrior]

I hope to see some benchmarks soon.

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

[Michael]

colo, how is the board running?

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