Intel GMA950 & xf86-video-intel 2.1.0

While we had not included benchmarks in this article from previous xf86-video-intel driver releases, we haven't found any noticeable performance improvements in any configuration when using version 2.1.0 compared to the previous 2.0 release that had come out two months ago. The xf86-video-intel-2.1.0 release does, however, add support for the latest 3100/X3100 integrated graphics and fixes a number of bugs. While the graphics power between a GMA 950 and ATI Radeon X800XL cannot even be compared hardware wise, the Intel Linux driver still has a ways to go when it comes to performance tuning and optimizations. If you are looking for more serious graphics horsepower with official open-source drivers you will want to check out the GMA 3000 or GMA 3100 series. We will be publishing a more extensive Intel Linux graphics comparison shortly, which does include Intel GMA X3100 benchmarks. For community open-source drivers there is also the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards and the Radeon/Avivo drivers for ATI graphics cards.

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