GMA 945 Graphics + WoW

[JiuJitsu500]

Hey! Here's one I'm sure has been discussed...

Roommate is a huge WoW fan and plays ALL the time and finally got ubuntu 9.10 installed on his external in a 60GB partition he made for it... after he gave me the disc back he's been trying to get WoW to work... which it does to a point, but Graphics are no bueno, and he can't even enable desktop 3D effects, and needless to say, no compiz either.

It's an old Dell Inspiron E1405, with a GMA 945 or 950 graphics card...

So I told him to re-install the driver (sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-driver-intel or something like that, read on another thread) after we tried a normal install and saying it has the latest driver... and the re-install failed at enabling 3D stuff and WoW obviously still looked like a Nintendo trying to run Halo 3... No proprietary drivers either except for wireless...

Anyone got any tips on perhaps a different driver? Even a roll-back maybe?

[cascade9]

Inspiron E1405- intel 945 chipset, GMA 950 video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_E1405

As far as I know, the GMA950 doesnt support hardware t&l (transform and lighting). You really want that for WoW-

The following Intel® integrated graphics controllers support hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L):

• The integrated graphics controller of the Intel® G35, G41, G43, G45, G965, GL40, GL960, GM45, GM965, and GS45 Express Chipsets
• Intel® HD Graphics

All other Intel® graphics products do not have hardware support for T&L. In most games, transform and lighting calculations can be performed on the processor with acceptable performance. A small number of games that specifically check for hardware T&L support may fail to run.

http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-011910.htm

Video:

Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or better
Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/technology.html

[JiuJitsu500]

Well if that doesn't throw a few wrenches in the gears I don't know what would.... damn...

Thanks for the reply On the same computer though, using Windows Vista, the game works wonderfully..... That's what confused me (still got learning to do in linux/ubuntu ad plent of it), he's doing all kinds of crazy stuff right now and I'm googling and typing over here to try and give a simpler answer. He's downloading a "linux driver for intel 9xx series cards" or something right now...

EDIT* Oh, and his quote is funny - "This is the dealbreaker, I will not put this on my computer if the game doesn't work in Ubun-whatever" Says he wants to suprise his wife when he gets home (in Iraq) with this.

[cascade9]

Its probable that the intel drivers for windows are better than the linux drivers. Or because he is using an external hdd enclosure, its using more CPU (USB uses a lot more CPU power for HDD access than the normal IDE/SATA internal connections). Its also accessing the files slower (USB 2.0 will run at about 1/2 the speed of what I expect a SATA laptop hdd).

That could be enough to make the game stutter.

Hopefully, the intel 9xx drivers for linux worked though