Intel x3000 Performance?

[BrndNtrl]

I've done a few quick searches and found almost nothing which details it.

Supposedly the intel x3000 is capable of pretty much everything a modern video card is- complete with compatability with DX10. Now, I don't expect performance to be on par with a discrete video card at all- in fact I'm not expecting too much from the DG965WH
board which came with my retail bundle until the new value DX10 cards come out.

I'm not anticipating a high end gaming platform out of this motherboard, but I'm curious, after hearing so much about how this GMA is supposed to bring the GPU a bit closer to integrated graphics in terms of capability, how well does it run?

I've heard drivers are slowing it down a bit, but is there anywhere there might be solid benchmarks posted where I might be able to get an idea of what I can expect?

From Wikipedia:

In the top-end G965 the X3000 offers 8 full-featured unified pipelines running at 667 MHz. This is a quite high clock speed compared to most GPUs, which are generally between 400 MHz (low-end) and 667 (high-end). In comparison to fixed function, Intel datasheets indicate 2 pixel pipeline, for total of 1.33Gpixels/s(how the unified shaders are used are mystery at this point). It can also share up to 384MB of RAM with the computer's CPU. Digital Video Out (DVO) port is boosted to 270 Mpixel/s. Dual independent display is supported via device connected to DVO port.

Early performance tests show the X3000 to be quite a bit slower than the GMA 950, but are incorrectly interpreted, as there exist no public Windows drivers that makes use of all the X3000 hardware features; the tests showed an older driver falling back to software rendering [2].

 

[JJMan]

Dark Mesiah (demo) is slow and choppy on a C2D E6600 system (DG965WH) with 2GB. I bought everything except the video card as I'm waiting for the right price/performanc point, so I'm stuck with the onboard for a bit. All in all it's ok. Civ4 plays fantastically, so I can't complain. If your gaming requires anything more than that, I think you'll want to get a discrete card.

 

[AntiSocialMunky]

Currently its about the same as the 950 plus or minus a few FPS. It'll probably top out at about a X1300 with DX10 support though you never know without good drivers. I wouldn't count on it to do any gaming in DX10 considering it only has 8 pipelines and is an IGP but again, you never know.

I heard that the memory bandwidth increase from 667 to 800 can boost performance a noticable amount.