GMA X3000
From Mac Guides
The GMA X3000 is Intel's next Integrated Graphics module for use in the "digital home," and is currently used in Intel's desktop chipsets (including G965 Express chipset).
The GMA X3000 seeks to remedy the 3D performace issues of the GMA 900 and GMA 950 by having full hardware support for modern gaming architecture. Each of the X3000's pipelines are fully programmable and in theory X3000 can target either DirectX 9 or DirectX 10, determined by operating system and device driver. The pipelines can be dynamically assigned to various tasks like pixel or vertex shading.
The GMA X3000 and GMA 3000 (Vertex Shaders and T&L are still CPU bound.) are currently available for Intel desktop computers. The GMA X3000 for the performance chipset G965 and the GMA 3000 for the lower end Q965 and Q963 chipsets. While the X3000 does have onboard vertex and T&L support, there has been a lack of decent drivers to test its performance. Some early benchmarks have shown it to perform between the ATI Radeon X550 and the nVidia 7300 GS. [1] Much more recent performance tests show acceptable performance in Half-Life 2. [2]
Comparison
| GMA 950 | GMA X3000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Clock Speed | 400 MHz | 667 MHz |
| Pipelines | 4 pixel + 1 vertex | 8 unified pipelines |
| Shader Model | 2.0 (Pixel Shader 2.0, Vertex Shader 3.0) | 3.0 (Pixel + Vertex Shader 3.0)* |
| VRAM | 224MB maximum | 384MB maximum |
| T & L Support | CPU Based | Hardware T&L |
| DirectX Support | 9.0 | 9.0c** |
| OpenGL Support | 1.4 w/ enhanced lighting | 2.0 |
* The GMA X3000 has fully programmable pipelines so there is always the possibility of a Shader Model 4.0 driver update in the future.
** Could eventually be changed to DirectX 10 with a driver update thanks to programmable pipelines, although Intel appears to not be initially developing DirectX 10 drivers. [3]
