someone with a x3100

[1ny0urfac3]

hmm thanks for the input

[1ny0urfac3]

Thanks a lot for all your help!

[Sockerdrickan]

I want shader support

[Melcar]

Are we comparing Intel vs. ATi cards on OpenGL here? Because the Intel x3100 seems to get framerates in OpenGL much closer to those I get in DirectX games running in Windows than my last (admittedly bad) ATi card, the ATi Xpress 200m. Neither of them are gaming cards, but the ATi ran OpenGL games as slideshows.


Anyway. I tested Urban Terror, and with everything turned down at 800x600, I got about 60FPS. Same settings at 1024x768, and I averaged between 40FPS and 30FPS, though it did spike at 60FPS when I was in smaller areas. It's quite playable, as long as you don't mind the low settings. I turned the texture quality up to normal, the color depth up to 32bit, and texture filtering to trilinear, and at 1024x768 I started getting framerates between 15FPS and 25FPS.

My machine is a Vostro 1510, with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.9 GHz and 2 gigs of ram.

Hmm, interesting. With my laptop's 200M I get near identical performance in both Nexuiz and Urban Terror as I do under Windows (800x600 @ medium type settings produce very playable results); Alien Arena as well, although that game seems to run **** poor with ATI cards in both Windows and Linux. The only slideshow happens when I use the latest builds of the open source driver; performance seems to be around 50% across all supported chips compared to what fglrx can provide.

[Frem]

Interesting. I know a LOT of the xpress 200m cards have horrible OpenGL performence in general; you probably got one that doesn't.

[rcsdnj]

Frem, I've recently bought a laptop with the same card you have (Intel X3100), but I'm completely disappointed with the performance difference of the card running on Windows Vista and on Ubuntu (tried with same software, like Celestia or Google Earth).

Did you had to do any special setting to make it work reasonably? Are you using Ubuntu Hardy? This card is almost unusable to me in Linux, really to slow compared to Windows and to any other card.

Direct rendering is enabled and Compiz works. Disabling Compiz doesn't help, also

[Extreme Coder]

I wouldn't play games on any Intel card on Linux if my life depended on it..

Three friends of mine where at my house once, and they liked Linux so much, they asked me to put it on their laptops. The games I have for Linux were enough and they loved Compiz.
- One had a laptop with an Intel X3100. We barely got Compiz going(although glitchy), and only Urban Terror managed to run on it. Games that run fine on Wine like Warcraft III, WoW, or Age of Empires could never work. (Same experience with another friend with Intel GMA 965)
- The other two, one with ATI, other with nVIDIA, were a dream to set up. I got all the games I have, and desktop effects working just fine.

The problems with Intel cards are due to an old implementation of OpenGL (1.2 or 1.5 I think, while ATI and NVIDIA have complete 2.1), and it's even incomplete(no S3TC support for example), and they're slower than on Windows, and so on..

While some of these problems are shared by all opensource drivers, Intel's seem to be the worst. With the X200 and X300 most games run fine on OSS drivers (albeit not the same performance as FGLRX).

[Perfect Storm]

Aye, intel is %98 no-go when it comes to gaming. get a nvidia card if you want to (serious) gaming on linux.

[Extreme Coder]

Aye, intel is %98 no-go when it comes to gaming. get a nvidia card if you want to (serious) gaming on linux.

Even ATI would be a better choice than Intel

[Frem]

I wouldn't play games on any Intel card on Linux if my life depended on it..

Three friends of mine where at my house once, and they liked Linux so much, they asked me to put it on their laptops. The games I have for Linux were enough and they loved Compiz.
- One had a laptop with an Intel X3100. We barely got Compiz going(although glitchy), and only Urban Terror managed to run on it. Games that run fine on Wine like Warcraft III, WoW, or Age of Empires could never work. (Same experience with another friend with Intel GMA 965)
- The other two, one with ATI, other with nVIDIA, were a dream to set up. I got all the games I have, and desktop effects working just fine.

The problems with Intel cards are due to an old implementation of OpenGL (1.2 or 1.5 I think, while ATI and NVIDIA have complete 2.1), and it's even incomplete(no S3TC support for example), and they're slower than on Windows, and so on..

While some of these problems are shared by all opensource drivers, Intel's seem to be the worst. With the X200 and X300 most games run fine on OSS drivers (albeit not the same performance as FGLRX).

Wait, what? That definitely doesn't match up with my experiences on my laptop. How long ago was this?

- The X3100 and GM965 are the same card. (Not to be confused with the GMA 950, which does run a lot more slowly.)
- Compiz works well out of the box, on the livedisk.
- Warcraft III runs almost flawlessly if you use the -opengl argument.
- I'm not entirely sure why you're even mentioning Age of Empires; that's 2D and didn't even need OpenGL last time I checked. It worked at full speed even on my ATi Xpress 200m, which ran OpenGL games so slowly that even 2D OpenGL had horrible performance.
- I actually just installed Age of Empires II, and that runs fine with the command "wine empires2.exe -- --opengl -nostartup". (Note that I'm actually turning the game's OpenGL engine on. By default, it will try to use a non-accelerated rendering engine Wine doesn't fully support.)
- The OpenGL implementation is 1.4. I agree that this is the largest barrier to gaming on the card. However, it's also open source, so I expect we'll get OpenGL 2 stuff eventually.
- The ATi Linux drivers are also slower than on Windows.
- Having had a borked Xpress 200m card in my last laptop, I can say that Intel is definitely a step up.

I freely admit to having trouble getting Savage and Unreal Tournament 2004 working (though I'm pretty sure the latter is more related to library versions than it is to the graphics card.)

I mean, the Intel GMA X3100 is not a gaming card on any operating system in any way shape or form however you slice it, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. It's pretty much the best Linux-compatible low-end/integrated graphics card you can get in a laptop nowadays.