Talk:Intel GMA

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I know its boring, but Intel's efforts at graphics from the ill fated i740, to the 810/15, should be here also. Timharwoodx 10:39, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

The section saying that Intel open sourced it's X11 graphics driver is a bit misleading. More accurately, they added support for the new 965 chips to the existing open-source 'i810' driver in the X.org source tree. Intel graphics products have had open source support for years now, but what is notable about the 965 support is that the release of this chip was a point at which Intel could have easily gone binary-only (as ATI did some years ago). They did have a binary-only driver called the IEGD (Intel Embedded Graphics Driver), but as the name suggests, this driver was not targeted at desktop and laptop end-users. Among other things, it lacked full 3D acceleration support. It was, however, capable of mode setting without the video BIOS (as the 'i810' driver was not) and driving third-party TV encoders. Now, this functionality is now available in open source and being worked on by Intel developers in a branch of the driver's freedesktop.org git tree. I am not aware of the fate of the proprietary driver, but it as far as I know it has no secrets or extra features anymore, or those that it does will soon be in the OSS driver. Simba B 00:03, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Many questions

Why did every section state the chip was not based on the PowerVR. This implies that some other chip was? Otherwise, why even mention it at all?

Why does the 950 section claim that it supports Shader Model 3, yet the X3000 claims that will be the first to do so?

The 950 only supports SM3.0 in software; you'd never get usable performance figures from it. It'd only really be useful as a tool for developers to test their SM3.0 code on and ensuring that it was bug free. --DaveJB 13:57, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Why does the 950 section claim that SM3 doubles the 3DMark performance?

Why does the 950 have a higher peak pixel fill rate if the clocks and pipes are the same as the 900?

I take this one back, I mis-read the numbers. I have updated the page.

Maury 21:07, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Dave, do you know if the 950's shader support also worked on the 900's then? It's certainly possible Intel wouldn't back port, but given that it was all running on the host CPU, it seems equally possible they could have. Maury 13:25, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

It's certainly possible, the 900 and 950 have similar enough cores. I think Intel's concern was that you'd need a dual-core CPU to get useful performance figures from software SM3.0 code (though it would still be nowhere near fast enough for any game), and since there's no way to modify 915G to support a dual-core processor, they just didn't see the point in allowing it to support SM3.0. --DaveJB 13:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Ahhh. Got it, thanks! Maury 15:51, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hardware details section

Could whoever wrote that section originally please indicate what chips are being talked about? Thank you. Simba B 21:18, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inquirer article

That thing (both the link and maybe the reference) needs to go--it is biased (and wrong as the article points out)--and IIRC it was based on a early version of the chip and drivers which probably has no bearing on what is availble on the market now. Objections? If not I'll remove it. Simba B 21:29, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

No, go for it. What is annoying is that Intel makes what appear to be two very different GMA's and refers to them both as the 9000. This is going to lead to continued confusion. Maury 12:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)