My Intel X3100 does DX10 :)

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Scali2

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Intel has promised DX10 support on some of their IGPs long ago, but there has never been any actual DX10 driver...
Recently rumours were surfacing that driver version 15.9, which is due for release in late April to early May, would be the one that enabled DX10 at last, on selected IGPs.

Anyway, when I looked around, I found this site:
http://www.computerbase.de/downloads..._grafiktreiber

These are a 15.9 beta release from last month, and they actually do deliver DX10.

Not that it allows me to play Crysis on low detail, but still (the game does actually start in DX10 mode and seems to render correctly, something that even DX9 didn't do until 15.8) :)

Anyway, at least it will allow me to use hardware acceleration when I'm developing my DX10-engine on my laptop, and that's great news for me... The DX10 tutorial with the textured cube used to spin at < 1 fps in software... Now I get 1500 fps, so that's quite an improvement :)
 
Rofl you almost made me laugh out loud here in my schools library bluepill that was awesome
 
Just wait till 3DMark Vantage comes out and I tell you my score!
Let's set up a poll... will it be 0 or 1 3dmarks? :)
 
Haha, no way :)
In 3DMark05 I score 910 points.
In 3DMark06 I score 560 points.

So I think 3DMark Vantage will score lower than 560.
The CPU in my laptop is a Core2 Duo T5250 by the way (1.5 GHz dualcore, 2 mb cache).
 
Well, with these new drivers I also tried some DX9 games...
A while ago, Intel promoted their coming drivers with hardware vertexprocessing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phmypcn6b9Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OogVYWQLAhM

But these were for XP, and my laptop came with only Vista, so I still couldn't get this performance... in fact a lot of games didn't even run, or run properly.
I tried them with these new DX10 drivers, and indeed, Far Cry is now actually quite playable, and renders correctly even at the highest detail settings. It also looks great, with good texture filtering and all.
HalfLife 2 also works nicely and looks great, although it still had some minor glitches. It can even handle Episode 1 reasonably well, including the HDR effects.

So well, Intel just keeps on improving their hardware and drivers... They still have a ways to go, but if they continue improving, they may well have good quality drivers and a very nice GPU by the time Larrabee is introduced.
I also wonder what the X4000-series is going to do, considering that the X3100 is already capable of acceptable gaming now, and is DX10-compatible. X4000 may actually make Crysis doable.
 
Sweet, its about time too!

Still sad to see them go really slow on producing these drivers and we are only in beta drivers still.
 
Alas, no 3DMark Vantage score for the X3100 yet. It only managed to render 2 frames, then it froze (tried it 3 times, same thing everytime).
Mind you, at frame 2 the timestamp was 1:54, so it needs less than 1 minute to render a frame!
 
The 15.9 drivers are now officially released. They work slightly better than the beta drivers, but still not exactly flawless, especially in DX10. 3DMark Vantage still cannot complete, and some of the DX10 SDK examples also show rendering bugs, or just crash completely.
 
I'm sorry, but theres no way in hell you will get decent FPS on an X3100, hell, it doesn't break the 10000 mark in 3dmark 01. At most, the X3100 is a 9600 non-pro, and nothing will change that. Even my 8400 GS is mostly a novelty, and it is at least 2.5X better than the X3100. Hopefully with larrabee, the drivers will do a 180 turn from their current state.
Crysis? No way, i've tried once, it just crashed, after running at 3 FPS on low settings 800X600 DX9. DX10 is just a novelty for the X3100.
Check out this review: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4154
the X3100 couldn't do far cry at 640X480 on high.
Honestly, this isn't a good gaming card, not even decent, not even terrible...worse. It is meant for people who don't use graphically intensive programs enough to justify paying 100 extra for an 8400 series or 8600 series.
I think at most, the X3100 could be expected to run unreal 1 decently, and no more.
Sorry for cutting everybody with an X3100 down, but it is good at what it does, and NOTHING else.

Here:

So I set everything to its lowest setting and ran the video stress test. Here's what happened:

* At 640x480, it produced an average of 20.35 frames per second.
* At 800x600, it produced an average of 19.15 frames per second.
* At 1024x768, it produced an average of 16.39 frames per second.

This is horrendous. Lost Coast isn't THAT much more stressful than vanilla Half-Life 2 at these settings. I've read people getting solid performance in Half-Life 2 on the forums, but that clearly didn't reproduce here, where framerates were erratic at best and performance was dismal.

I'm sure by now you've noticed an abundant lack of the screenshots which usually accompany my reviews. Simply put, image quality on the X3100 is, much like the framerates often are, erratic. I've played very little on it where there wasn't some kind of artifact that creeped up, be it the odd polygon here, or nasty texture flicker there. About the only game I ran on it that seemed to look right was Far Cry.


If you're going to game even casually on your laptop, unfortunately, I don't think the X3100 can be settled for. While technically the hardware is there, it's not worth gambling on it, hoping that eventually Intel will magically make it suck less. There just aren't any guarantees.
 
I think everyone already knows how much Intel IGPs and their drivers suck in general... This was a tongue-in-cheek thread, perhaps it got lost on some people.

I don't take IGPs seriously as a rule. Even the 780G, the fastest IGP at this moment, is still far from acceptable in most games. The main difference is that AMD and nVidia actually have drivers that just work. I'm happy to see that Intel seems to be working on this at last.
IGPs will never be fast anyway, because they have to use system memory. But it'd be nice to see if Intel could at least make their X4000-series perform in the same ballpark as AMD's and nVidia's offerings... and if their drivers will actually run most software by then. They seem to be on the right track anyway. Perhaps they realize that drivers are to be taken seriously aswell, now that they want to build discrete GPUs.
 
Sorry, the humor was lost on me :D, honestly though, one thing intel def. needs to work on is multimonitor support in their drivers... Very hard to hook up two displays on my sisters laptop.
Sorry if I seemed defensive, but I openly Admit, I am a little biased against intel... always have been.
 
I game "casually" on my laptop with x3100 video and i'm satisfied with it. :cool:
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I installed the 15.9 drivers today and the DX10 functionality isn't useful at all. There are way too many bugs in the DX10 part of the driver, as mentioned by scali above. It does show promise though, although not really for gaming. Some of the DX10 samples have very impressive speed-ups, that is the ones that don't crash do. :p

Intel really needs to decrease driver bugginess if they hope to compete in the 3D graphics market. ATI, S3 and nvidia wouldn't designate these drivers to be release quality for the sole "added feature."

The highlight though is this: http://downloadmirror.intel.com/15886/ENG/relnotes_winvista64_gfx.htm . Wow, mobile and desktop drivers in one official package. Too bad nvidia and ATI won't do that. :rolleyes:
 
The way things are going with Intel, I hope they take up the strategy that ATi uses: a new driver every month.
Apparently they work quite hard on these drivers, judging from the difference between the beta 15.9 and the final only a few weeks later. The SDK samples are less buggy, and features like predicated rendering now work properly (as in: offer a speedup). And 3DMark06 goes from 560 to 600 points... quite significant really.
Although at this point they should just concentrate on DX9...

I can't wait to see the performance of X4000 aswell. It will be a magic moment when Intel breaks the 1000 3DMarks in 3DMark06 for the first time... perhaps X4000 and a few more driver updates can get us there :)
On an Athlon X2 the 780G only scores about 1100-1200 3DMarks anyway... It scores 1500ish only on the Phenom because of the improved HT links and memory controller. So for dualcore systems, Intel may get pretty close to AMD if they do reach the 1000 3DMark-goal that they seem to have set out.
 
Well, I've played through the entire HalfLife 2 game now, with these drivers. I had it set to 1280x800 and everything at max (including anisotropic filtering), but simple water reflections (they seemed to hurt performance too much).
In general it was quite a good experience (framerates between ~10 and ~60 fps throughout, about 20-25 fps on average). About as good as with my old Athlon and Radeon 9600Pro when I originally played it I suppose (although I ran that in 1024x768 at the time, but with 4xAA).
The game didn't crash, and generally rendered correctly and with good quality... There was only some sort of problem with the light attenuation in the distance... objects in the distance appeared too bright and stood out against the background (I'll have to check what happens when I force SM1.x or 2.0, it might be a bug with SM3.0 only).

I'm now playing through Episode One, again at the same high settings, but this game is apparently quite a bit heavier. It's more around 13-14 fps on average, and only barely playable this way. On the other hand you do get some pretty cool HDR effects. I'll have to loosen up some settings to get it more playable.
I've also tried a bit of Episode Two, but that's much heavier still. Indoors it works okay, but as soon as you're out in the open, it's really sluggish. Then again, my 9600 struggles considerably on it aswell.
 
Intel has officially released new 15.11 drivers for Vista.
See the release notes:
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/16777/eng/relnotes_winvista_gfx.htm

Apparently we're getting OpenGL 2.0 at last, and a bunch of bugfixes. Hopefully they've improved DX10 compatibility and performance. I'll be playing with these drivers tonight. I'd like to see if I can get through any of the 3DMark Vantage tests now, and I wonder if more of the DX10 SDK samples work now.
 
I forgot to follow up on this one...
The reason is simple: there's not much to report on these new drivers.
I've not found any significant performance difference between the 15.9 and 15.11 drivers, and all the rendering bugs and issues I could remember were still there.

I've not dabbled with OpenGL much... There's supposed to be OGL 2.0 support now. But I could only think of PhysX FluidMark to test it. It didn't run before, and it still doesn't run now. I think the error message is different now though, just a missing extension.
I suppose I could try Doom3 on it, that never worked before.

But on the D3D side, nothing much seems to have changed. One thing I noticed was that there was a 'twitch' in the desktop sometimes (I think when switching power modes). It wasn't there before the DX10 drivers. On these 15.11 drivers I haven't seen it yet, so perhaps it's fixed now, or at least not as often/apparent as before.
 
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