In August of this year Intel had announced their new Linux graphics driver website. At that time they had also announced the immediate availability of open-source 3D graphics drivers for their Intel 965 Express Chipset. The Intel 963/965 Chipsets boast fourth-generation Intel graphics architectures in the form of the GMA 3000 series. The GMA 3000 components consist of the flagship GMA X3000 in the G965 while the Q963 and Q965 boast a slightly less powerful GMA 3000. These IGPs aren't designed for delivering top-notch performance in the latest and greatest Linux games, but is rather designed for standard desktop usage while offering stability, low power consumption, and cost effectiveness. This, however, is our first time sharing how well the Intel GMA 3000 is able to perform under GNU/Linux with the open-source display drivers.

Some of the features for the Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3000 include support for dual independent displays, programmable array of execution units (known as EUs), dynamic load balancing, multi-threading support, and dynamic and static flow control. The dynamic load balancing is slated to improve game-play performance, enable greater realism, and enhance viewer fidelity -- according to Intel's white paper on the GMA 3000. The multi-threading support allows processing of multiple threads of graphics or video data simultaneously. The IGP is also multi-functional meaning that the execution units can seamlessly switch to process either graphics or video threads. Some of the other GMA 3000 family features include a 667MHz core, up to 256MB of system memory for video usage, supports ADD2 and media expansion cards, supports DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 2.0 (3.0 on the X3000), MPEG-2 hardware motion compensation, and advanced pixel adaptive de-interlacing.

The GMA X3000 is designed to add yet another level of complexity for enhanced performance with features such as Intel Clear Video Technology. The feature, however, that is important to many Linux enthusiasts is simply a matter of the drivers being open-source. The licenses for these drivers is an MIT license for the 2D, 3D GL, and BSD DRM components while the Linux AGP and DRM modules comply with the GNU GPL v2 license.

For delivering our GMA 3000 performance results we had used the Intel DQ965GFEKR motherboard. This micro ATX motherboard is backed by the iQ965 Express + ICH8 Chipset. Other than the GMA 3000 IGP, this Chipset supports the Intel Core 2 Duo processor (as well as compatibility with the LGA-775 Pentium and Celeron parts), DDR2, PCI Express x16, Intel High Definition (HD) audio, six Serial ATA 2.0 ports, Intel Gigabit LAN, Intel Matrix Storage Technology, and 10 USB 2.0 ports. According to Intel's documentation this executive series motherboard is designed for small and large businesses. Below is the run-down of system components used during testing.

Fedora Core 6 was used as the GNU/Linux distribution, with all Rawhide updates as of October 18, 2006. For comparing the performance of the GMA 3000 we had also benchmarked an ATI Radeon X300SE 128MB using the open-source R300 display drivers. This is not a complete comparison as we did not compare them against the GMA900 and GMA950, which under Microsoft Windows with the current drivers have outperformed the GMA 3000 family according to several reports. The intent of this article is to provide an insight as to what GMA 3000 users can expect to see performance-wise under GNU/Linux. We will be delivering additional GMA 3000 and X3000 articles in the future. The i965 GMA 3000 hardware supports the X-Video (xv) extensions through using TexturedVideo, which is similar to ATI's fglrx TexturedVideo implementation. Enabling TexturedVideo will allow the 3D hardware during video playback. These Intel open-source drivers fully support Compiz / Beryl as well as AIGLX. DriConf is available for configuring various user display options.

Now, finally onto the performance... Like our recent ATI R300 open and closed driver performance article, we turned to Enemy Territory (v2.60) with the Railgun demo while running the game at stock settings with various resolutions. We also used the legacy Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo with the standard benchmarking scripts. The resolution used for Unreal Tournament testing was 800 x 600. We had also used GL O.B.S. (GL Open Benchmark Suite) for running additional benchmarks. We had used GL O.B.S. v0.1 and the resolution used for the tests was 640 x 480.

When communicating with Keith Packard about the open-source Intel display drivers he had stated that right now there are currently no performance-tuning options available, as the driver is still undergoing significant development. Packard had mentioned that many performance improvements will be taking place from low-level chip optimizations to improving the quality of the Mesa project.

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