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)

Contents

[edit] Update the table with Aero?

Would be nice to see which chipsets support Aero at a glance. Someone should add a column listing Aero compatibility. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.3.116.36 (talk) 21:19, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Many questions

Why does the chart list the X3000 as being able to do OpenGL 2.0? According to the documentation on Intel's site, it does only hardware-accelerated 1.5. Is the 2.0 stuff done in software? If so, we should note this on the chart. --Peter 19:16, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

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?


These GPU's arent great.

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)


-> "The X3000 architecture contrasts strongly with common external GPUs, like those from ATI or nVidia. In these systems the different functions are handled by different types of pipelines; one type to handle T&L or vertex shaders, another for pixel shaders, and ones for texturing"

This statement is no longer accurate, as the new GPUs use dynamic pipelines, capable of either shader or vertex usage as needed. Wozdog 07:47, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


There is some incorrect info in the GMA 950 section:

"The amount of video-decoding hardware has increased; VLD, iDCT, and dual video overlay windows are now handled in hardware"

Those hardware features are not implemented until GMA 3100 using the G33 chipset (at least the VLD and IDCT...not completely sure about the dual video overlay windows). This is shown in reference 20 (http://download.intel.com/products/graphics/intel_graphics_guide.pdf), which, by the way, is really all you need to look at for a complete comparison for all the graphics cores from GMA 950 - X3500. That link should be more prominently displayed, IMHO. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.177.205.91 (talk) 22:19, 14 February 2008 (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)
This particular Inquirer article fails the smell test, and has problems to boot. There's just no way the silicon of the X3000 would implement the same funcationality as the 950 in a less performant fashion, it's based on the same design. The Inquirer's MO is to shoot from the hip, and sometimes they just plain miss. Be circumspect in using them as an external source, they're very much in the press world of calling things early, right or wrong, which is fine. But they _rarely_ come back and correct a link that turns out to be dead wrong. This particular one, remove. JoshuaRodman 12:27, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tense

This article is a messy mixture of present and past tense. I don't have the patience to fix it, but everything should be one or the other tense. For instance: "was basic even by contemporary standards, and lacks support" should be either "was basic even by contemporary standards, and lacked support" or "is basic even by contemporary standards, and lacks support". Foobaz·o< 01:16, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

-> We've been trying to make the wiki accurate, but our (Intel) posts keep getting erased. We are only trying to make the info accurate. We'll update it immediately when it changes if you'll allow us to. But don't compare graphics integrated into the memory controller hub to that imbedded on the motherboard. It will only make you look like you don't know much about the technical aspects of integrating computer graphics into a northbridge, while maintaining a good asp on a midrange graphics product.

[edit] ATI Xpress 200

Under the GMA950 section, why all the comparisons to the ATI XPress 200?

Perhaps it is a baseline comparison 130.15.107.10 16:04, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tile based rendering vs. deferred rendering/texturing

The article claims that "the GMA series uses tile based rendering, which aims to ensure that only pixels that will end up on-screen will flow through the rendering pipeline." However, I think the term hidden surface removal is more appropriate to describe the technique of removing non-visible parts of the scenery. Tile-based rendering just means that the screen is divided into tiles.

PowerVR also uses the term deferred rendering to describe their HSR-before-texturing. Chithanh 00:18, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Drivers

This article is about hardware. If you want to write about drivers, please be specific about which drivers you're on about. There are various drivers for various operating systems. If you don't specify exactly which driver you mean, your contribution is meaningless. TIA. --Harumphy 09:52, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Still, it would be great to have a reference for people who are looking for driver setup information. For example, it took me a long time and lots of pain to discover that the correct name for the GMA 3000 driver on FreeBSD is actually called "i810", and the chip is called "Q965". All I had to go on was the name "GMA 3000" from my motherboard documentation. It would be handy to have a link to this kind of information all in one place. --TopQuark, 22 July 2007

I have added links about the drivers question (WinXp & Win Vista drivers BTW) --ManoloKosh 20:05, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Do you see any T&L drivers? No. So why list the OS for which no drivers are available ?

  • Are you sure about that? How do you know? Have you reviewed the source code for xorg-video-intel 2.0, which was released two days ago? Besides, there's more to a driver than T&L. And please sign your comments with 4 tildes. --Harumphy 11:06, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I listed WinXP and Win Vista because are the OS mentioned by Intel in the link

--ManoloKosh 13:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

The latest driver for the 965 series is 15.7 for Vista, released 11/14/2007 and 14.31.1 for XP, released 9/4/2007 From the version number and date, it looks like Intel may be halting Windows XP driver development for this, or putting it on a lower priority. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 10:27, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Latest 965 driver version is 15.7.3 1/10/2008 for Vista and 14.32.3 12/29/2007 for XP. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 21:12, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
This release of the Vista driver exhibits even worse geometry and texture rendering errors with the Final version of farbrausch's "Candytron" demo than previous versions. http://www.farbrausch.de/productions.php Earth to Intel, the word is DE-bugging. You're not supposed to make each new driver release WORSE! The same driver on this chipset has no problem with the newer and much more complext demos "Zeitmaschine" and "Theta". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 00:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
These problems may be a problem in Vista, I was able to run this demo on a new PC with an ATi HD4200XT (a card which cost more than the laptop with the Intel 965 Express chipset) and it not only had the same geometry errors and checkerboard texture rendering, it either failed to render or flipped the normals of some polygons. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 05:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Just a comment to say that it is deceiving to see all the support for pixel and vertex shaders (3.0 and better) and opengl 1.5 in the chart, when GLSL is not supported in the Windows drivers. This page is useful as a reference for selecting hardware, but I would not have bought any of these chipsets if I knew GLSL was missing! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.246.189.54 (talk) 22:44, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Software support section

I've added a new section, so that discussion of drivers can be clearly OS-specific and disentangled from discussion of the hardware. --Harumphy 15:15, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Parallel GMA and PEG

Someone should add if it's possible to use Intels onboard graphics and a PCI Express Graphics Card in parallel.

For G33 its (http://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/31696601.pdf): "The GMCH also has the capability to support external graphics accelerators via the PCI Express Graphics (PEG) port but cannot work concurrently with the integrated graphics device."

I do not know for the others.

Is it possible the original post is referring to an ADD2 card? I use one of these in my system. Rather than being restricted to an onboard VGA port, an ADD2 card can theoretically add any other type of port via an Add-in card, in my case, a DVI port. ...teddy 19:05, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Menlow

Intel's UMPC for 2008 called Menlow will use a GMA that has OpenGL 2.0 but only DirectX 9. I guess this is because the focus is on MIDs that use intel and will be better suited to OpenGL technology. It also has VC1.

This has been fabricated and demonstrated at CES 2007. At the time there were only a couple in existance.

This means the creation of a new GMA not listed here specifically for UMPC in 2008.

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/news.php?tid=777324&starttime=0&endtime=0

I would not add this until it is confirmed more than a intel powerpoint slide in chinese.

[edit] GMA X3000 and Unified Shaders

I think ther is a mistake here. It stakes DX9 and unified shader. We all know that unified shaders need DX10, or shader mdoel 4.0, however this card only supports DX9c and Shader Model 3.0. In the description of X3000 there is no reference to something exsceptional.

Can someone confirm this is a mistake. There is nothing about this in intels whitepaper.

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma3000/gma3000.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by Icurafu (talk • contribs)

The phrase "unified shader" is used to mean two different things:
  • Under "Hardware: graphics cores: GMA X3000" the article says "... hardware is organized as a unified shader processor consisting of 8 scalar execution units. Each pipeline can process video, vertex, or texture operations."
  • In Windows, the phrase unified shader model refers to the combining of the pixel shader model and the vertex shader model into one thing from DX10 onwards.
So - in one case the phrase refers to the hardware architecture and doesn't relate to any particular API, and the other is a Windows API thing. Maybe the hardware description should be rewritten to change the phrase "unified shader processor" into something less ambiguous. --Harumphy 09:58, 6 July 2007 (UTC)


Some good points. My view is that the item in the table requires a digit or a negative which would make me beleive that the DirectX 10 unified shader is the required value, not the questionable intel documention.

The hardware describes what is needed to allow software to utilise unified shaders. Does this mean that x3000 will get unified shaders in the future once drivers are created to take adventage of the hardware? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Icurafu (talk • contribs)

Xbox 360 uses unified shaders but is not DirectX 10 compliant. DirectX 10 is just a MS API. It has nothing to do with whether the hardware manufacturers can make a bunch of ALUs that can process both vertex and pixel shader code. Considering X3000 has only 8 scalar ALUs, a palty sum with which to do all calculations, I wouldn't expect any sort of decent performance in modern games from it. --Swaaye 20:23, 30 July 2007 (UTC)


the x3100 has unified shaders and thus also supports OpenGL2.0, should be changed. Markthemac 22:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Video chip stress tests

To find out what features a video chip really supports, try the 3D demos from Farb Rausch. http://www.farb-rausch.com/productions.php One of interest is the final version of "Candytron". With the current 15.7 drivers for Vista, the 965 Express not only runs that demo with bad geometry errors in two segments, it also has some texture rendering errors that weren't present in the 15.61 drivers, which just had the geometry errors. (Note that "Candytron" is Farb Rausch's only NSFW demo, if you want to check out the demo.) The older 865 chipset (for which driver development ended in 2005) renders the geometry perfectly, though it can't render some of the effects. The 965 Express runs much more complex and GPU stressing demos like Theta, The Popular Demo and Zeitmaschine 100% correct. No other GPU capable of running "Candytron" that I've run it on has exhibited these geometry and texture errors. (The "party" version of "Candytron" has geometry errors, but they're due to the time pressure of writing the demo during a competition and are thus "built in".) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizzybody (talk • contribs) 11:01, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removed references to Macbook/Macbook Air

Apple is only one among many manufacturers using GMA-graphics. I can't see why they should be mentioned on this page more than models from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer etc. And it would make a pointless clutter of it, would it not. This page is about GMAxxx, not about which company use it in which models. So please don't add it again unless you have a really good reason to do so. 222.124.213.19 (talk) 01:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)/BigFish 2008-01-17

[edit] Incorrect Info

The Sims 2 requires T&L capabilities. I have a GMA 950- which is said to be unable to handle this operation, but I can play the game fine. The Intel specifications say that the GMA 950 can handle this without a problem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 153.90.112.189 (talk) 22:31, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some question with Intel GMA X4500

I saw, at Wikipedia's table, the spec that GMA X4500 has clocked at 1066MHz, but i cannot found where to prove the fact. Could you give me the evidence that can prove the fact, please?

(Sorry, I can't speak English exactly.. orz) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.235.190.12 (talk) 15:51, 26 February 2008 (UTC)