Intel GMA950 & xf86-video-intel 2.1.0

It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets as well as fixing a horde of bugs and adding PCI IDs for the 945GME, 965GME, and 965GLE chips. As our last Intel graphics performance article was looking at the Q965 back in May, in this article we have enclosed some benchmarks from Intel's GMA 950 IGP using the new xf86-video-intel 2.1.0 driver.

The motherboard we had used when carrying out these latest tests was the ASRock Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0. This ATX motherboard uses Intel's 945G/945GC A2 Chipset with the ICH7 Southbridge and boasts support for dual-core 1333MHz FSB LGA-775 processors. Offered by the ASRock Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0 motherboard is an onboard VGA D-Sub connector for the integrated GMA 950 graphics, while also included is a DVI graphics HDCP-capable adapter. We will be featuring a review of the Conroe1333-DVI/H R2.0 later in the month.

Other hardware components had included an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor and 2 x 1024MB of OCZ Reaper HPC 2GB PC2-8500 memory. The operating system used was Fedora 7 with the 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 kernel and we had upgraded the X.Org drivers from Fedora Rawhide, which includes the Intel 2.1.0 Linux display driver. The graphics processor used for comparison was the ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI Express x16 solution with the open-source ATI Radeon 6.6.3 driver. The benchmarks used in this graphics comparison were Enemy Territory, Doom 3, and Unreal Tournament 2004; however, there are some missing textures present with Doom 3 using the open-source ATI/Intel drivers. This article is intended to offer just a glance at the level of performance offered by the Intel GMA 950 using the latest driver compared to the Radeon X800XL. Additional benchmarks will be published in the near future.