Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 4, 2007 15:29 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal) by ofeeley
Parent article: Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

>I'm looking at the whole thing from the very biased perspective of someone that wants to buy a replacement c.$1000 home desktop. I don't need amazing graphics capabilities (although I would like the GPU to be as fast as possible) and only care about the driver being solidly supported by Xorg. Right now that means an Intel G965 Express chipset:

You could slap a Radeon X300/700/8x0-series card into your desktop and get vastly superior performance than the Intel G965, not even taking into account the performance penalty of the shared-memory approach of the G965. Using only Free Software.

(I have several machines where I put an old PCI graphics card simply because the performance hit from the shared memory graphics adapter was noticable. It's why server-class boards use very low-end discrete graphics (eg ATI's Rage XL) instead of shared memory arrangements)

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Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 4, 2007 16:59 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you have practical experience with the G965 Express chipsets showing a heavy hit on CPU performance? Intel's own bumf about this generation of integrated graphics chips (X3000) and the wikipedia entry I cited above claim that many of those problems from earlier chipsets have been mitigated. I'm very interested to know if you have observed these problems specifically with this latest chipset?

ps. As an aside, looking at the rantings on Intel's forums from people that see what AIGLX can do with these chips while Vista can't is interesting
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/fo...

pps. It seems that Dell's 22" LCD displays won't support 1680x1050 with the X3000 from other threads on those forums (it seems to be WinXP users complaining about that, but someone else mentioned it was a problem for XOrg7.1 too)

Buy! Buy! Buy! - into Openness (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 5, 2007 21:45 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link]

Regarding 1680x1050, all I can say is that it works with GMA950 (945GM) and Dell 20" LCD (2007WFP). I even got it to work with an old first-generation Centrino 855GM. So it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't work with the latest chipset, though I haven't read any of those forums you mentioned.

You do need the new "modesetting" XOrg driver to get it working, though.