Thinkpads Forum

How does the X60's Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 compare (in terms of performance) to the X31 graphics controller?

What do pundits say about the X61's (whenever it becomes available) graphics controller? Will it be different / significantly better than the X60's, like the X31's was compared to the X30's?

Honestly I beleive GMA950 is s**t, no less.
Haven't time to wait so I bought X60. Will have it soon hopefully.

thibouille27 wrote:Honestly I beleive GMA950 is s**t, no less.
Haven't time to wait so I bought X60. Will have it soon hopefully.

It may perform poorly relative to today's high end graphics cards, but the X31's card is *ancient*. In fact, it shouldn't belong in a laptop, but in a museum.

If I'm not mistaken, the ATI Radeon card doesn't even have pixel shader support. On the other hand, the GMA950 should be able to perform most graphics tasks fairly well, and play most newer games, but not on the highest settings.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Phil! In fact, my needs in terms of graphics are pretty modest: I use my X31 mostly for business purposes and I don't play games. Watching a DVD once in a while would probably be the toughest burden I put on the graphics card. I guess the GMA950 would be up to the task?

domi wrote:Thanks, Phil! In fact, my needs in terms of graphics are pretty modest: I use my X31 mostly for business purposes and I don't play games. Watching a DVD once in a while would probably be the toughest burden I put on the graphics card. I guess the GMA950 would be up to the task?

A 1MB Cirrus Logic would be up to the task.

Regarding your last question, yes, a GMA950 is much more than enough , as the previous post states.

However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that a 1mb video card would work. For example, on one of my aging desktops, a 32mb ATI Rage Pro couldn't suffice, with extreme jittering and video/sound sync problems.

pphilipko wrote:However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that a 1mb video card would work. For example, on one of my aging desktops, a 32mb ATI Rage Pro couldn't suffice, with extreme jittering and video/sound sync problems.

Not due to the video card, but due to the CPU.

dr_st wrote:

pphilipko wrote:However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that a 1mb video card would work. For example, on one of my aging desktops, a 32mb ATI Rage Pro couldn't suffice, with extreme jittering and video/sound sync problems.

Not due to the video card, but due to the CPU.

My desktop has a Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU...

I have had a problem with T&L feature of the Age of Empires III game. My X60's Intel 950 does not support it and the performance of the sea battle was horrible. I didn't expect a strategy game to require advanced video feature that my 1-month old X60 does not have.

pphilipko wrote:

dr_st wrote:Not due to the video card, but due to the CPU.

My desktop has a Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU...

And you call that an aging desktop? Whatever. Anyway, then you had either codec or driver problems. Or something was faulty with the video card.

The onboard video should be better than the ATI card.

The only compliant I have is that it shares the system RAM. Allocating 128 Megs from the 512 that it ships with will leave you 384. Barely enough to run XP and definitely not adequate to run Vista.

Yaaeh, that's why I ordered a 1GB stick so I'll have 1.5GB

dr_st wrote:

pphilipko wrote: My desktop has a Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU...

And you call that an aging desktop? Whatever. Anyway, then you had either codec or driver problems. Or something was faulty with the video card.

no, a 1MB video card will not suffice if you want ANY kind of hardware accelleration which actually makes the picture look *good*

the 4mb trident in my gateway solo 9500 could *play* DVD's, but they looked like [censored].

The 16MB S3 in my T23 plays DVD's alright with the NV DVD decoder, but the picture is interlaced and the CPU is pegged at 1.2ghz the entire time. compared to my MR7500, radeon 9600, 6800GT, 7800GT, and anything else recent, it looks like [censored]. Hell, even compared to the GMA it would look like [censored].

As for the rage pro having problems, the Rage cards from ATI suck. they just plain suck - and its not a hardware issue, its a software issue. the drivers that came with rages were horrible, and the catalyst suite started with the Radeon.

Well the Rage's were quite popular for servers for quite a while as their reliability and stability was more important than performance.