Mesa 7.4 Through Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 7.4 Through Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks

Over the next few weeks there are a number of new Phoronix benchmarks to be published concerning the performance of Mesa 7.9 for both the Mesa classic and Gallium3D drivers from the different GPU vendors. Included in those tests will be new Intel Mesa benchmarks of their only officially supported 3D driver using one of the Arrandale processors, but for those currently missing out on the X Developers' Summit in Toulouse or PhoronixFest at Oktoberfest, here's a bonus article. For this extra round of benchmarking, we took one of the original Intel Atom benchmarks with i945 graphics and ran it with every major Mesa release since Mesa 7.4.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15286

[RealNC]

Most of these results, regardless of Mesa version, indicate that those games are almost unplayable; Quake with anything less than 60-ish FPS is not fun.

Is this mostly an Intel issue? How fast does it run on Windows with the same chipset?

[xeros]

I'd like to see another r300c vs r300g test on Ubuntu up to recent 10.10 snapshot.

[devius]

Most of these results, regardless of Mesa version, indicate that those games are almost unplayable; Quake with anything less than 60-ish FPS is not fun.

Is this mostly an Intel issue? How fast does it run on Windows with the same chipset?

Good question. I thought the 945GM was suppose to offer a little more performance than this. If I recall correctly Quake 3 ran perfectly on a Athlon XP 1800+ with a GeForce2 TI 64MB. The Atom N270 is more powerful than the Athlon, so that means the GMA950 is slower than a GeForce2??

[BlackStar]

Good question. I thought the 945GM was suppose to offer a little more performance than this. If I recall correctly Quake 3 ran perfectly on a Athlon XP 1800+ with a GeForce2 TI 64MB. The Atom N270 is more powerful than the Athlon, so that means the GMA950 is slower than a GeForce2??

Yes. The GMA is more versatile, however (shaders).

[DoDoENT]

I'd like to see another r300c vs r300g test on Ubuntu up to recent 10.10 snapshot.

I'd like to see that too. I'm considering to move to Gallium R300g driver, but so far all my tries to set it up failed. I'd like to know if it has become faster than R300c driver.

[squirrl]

GMA has shader 2.0.

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/index.htm

High Performance 3D
Up to 4 pixels per clock rendering
Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Hardware Acceleration Features:
Pixel Shader 2.0
Volumetric Textures
Shadow Maps
Slope Scale Depth Bias
Two-Sided Stencil
Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Vertex Shader 3.0 and Transform and Lighting supported in software through highly optimized Processor Specific Geometry Pipeline (PSGP)
Texture Decompression for DirectX* and OpenGL*
OpenGL* 1.4 support plus ARB_vertex_buffer and EXT_shadow_funcs extensions and TexEnv shader caching


I'd recommend sticking with Ubuntu 8.04 (work) or Windows Vista Home Premium (Gaming). The Windows drivers were the best. I think Intel beat Nvidia to a stable Aero driver back in Q406.. Quake Humor

[allquixotic]

Any Intel GMA chips before G45 aren't going to give very impressive performance on any 3d graphics, regardless of drivers or OS. That, and the graphics stack (Gallium3d, DRI2, KMS) is rapidly evolving features that only decrease the performance on these old cards. The more recent changes to the graphics stack are good for the latest and next generation Intel hardware, and for Nvidia and ATI hardware, but the old Intel chips are getting the ass end of the deal. As a "proud" owner of an i965 since 2007, I can say with confidence that no ioquake3 based game will ever run at playable speeds on this hardware.

[squirrl]

sure it will run an older version or move to windows

[devius]

sure it will run an older version or move to windows

That is correct. With Fedora 10 which used the 2.6.27 Kernel and a X.org version I can't remember, everything 3D related was much faster and smoother than it is today on the GMA950. We can't really complain since on the Windows side it's the same issue. With each new version performance drops. If I want top performance for games I'll switch to DOS 6.22