Intel 950 GMA Users!

http://groups.google.com/group/intel9x-gaming?hl=en

That website has assisted me a lot in getting the best out of this cheap graphics card. I recommend giving it a shot.


Also if you 950GMA users are not aware, you can use the drivers for a 965 graphics card and get Software TnL capibilities. If this doesn't make any sense, the link above should give you some information about it. But I can say this,

Intel 950 GMA Drivers < Series 4 Drivers (G33, G35, 965, etc)

You can't just simply download the driver and install it though, you need to mod what is called a Device ID. Its all in the 1st link though.


Also, overclocking your 950GMA is now possible! It has been for some time but I just heard of it. You can use a program called GMABooster to overclock your 950GMA.
http://www.gmabooster.com/index.htm

 

hmm got a bit list in that groups page, are you saying that we can improve the performance of the 950GMA with drivers from a card? if so, would you mind elaborating or giving a more descriptive link

or maybe im just lost lol

 

this is great for people who have netbooks, great job

If you have a netbook i woulf suggest looking at it.

 

I am currently messing with it. If I can get GH3 to run on my netbook, it'll be a sucess imo.

 

unknown keep us updated =) or could you umm give me an idea of where you are getting all the information

I have a crummy 950 in my laptop too and if I can get well anything other than maplestory running on my computer Ill be happy =)

 

965 is not a "graphics card" or integrated GPU, it's a chipset. If your machine has 965 chipset then it should be supported, but if its the 945, then most likely it will not work.

 

Edit: Just browsed around and with some googling around this actually does make quite a difference in fps on some games. If anyone needs help I can help anyone with err modding their drivers.

Thanks for the heads up to

 

yea, i want to do this with my dads laptop, but i don't get it... can any one explain this better?

 

basically you are installing drivers for a different chipset onto your 950

its really simple actually, its just that its hard to find the drivers and stuff

Basically what you do is first download the drivers here

http://intel9x-gaming.googlegroups....OhV4u3aa4iAIyYQIqbG9naPgh6o8ccLBvP6Chud5KMzIQ

then extract it with winrar, go to the graphics folder, and edit the igdlh.inf and replace everything there with this

http://intel9x-gaming.googlegroups....OhV4u3aa4iAIyYQIqbG9naPgh6o8ccLBvP6Chud5KMzIQ

go back, run setup for the drivers, you should be set

 

i edited the gateway drivers, and it appears to work... im getting about 7 more fps in CSS, but no gain in world in conflict

 

hmm I got huge gains in my games (guild wars), 7 FPS is decent I guess

forgot if you needed to add the game to the registry or something but yeah

 

humm..but usually for netbook the bottleneck is the processor

 

hmm well that is after a dedicated GPU is in their notebook, and remember the asus n10 or something can actually play unreal tournament, so the atom can play some games on lower settings...

but anyways some people have 950s on their laptop and this is geared more towards them (check my specs =/)

 

huh? (10 char)

 

Ok heres an explaination:

You can use drivers from the 965 to improve your 945 performance greatly. This requires modding the 965 driver to match your device ID. Once this is done, you can have games use what is called Sofware TnL. This can really bring a FPS increase in most games (especially source engine games like CS:S and TF2). These drivers are also known to improve performance in Aero for vista and 7.

I have also discovered a way to overclock the 950GMA too.
http://www.gmabooster.com/index.htm

The 950GMA chip is capable of running at 400MHz but most graphics cards like the 945GM,GU, etc run at only 133 and 200 MHz. So overclocking to 400 wouldn't decrease battery life much and it wouldn't produce much (if any) more heat. This works on XP, Vista, and 7

 

So will the GMA booster work in conjunction with the 965 drivers?

 

Also, what's the compatibility like with the GMA 900? Got a roommate with a Dell Inspiron 1300 w/Celeron M.
EDIT: Post 1111! Yey!

 

anyone? anyone?

 

Yea the modded drivers and the GMABooster would work together (or separately).

Right now I'm in the process of messing with a modified XP driver. I
'll give feedback later on...

 

Hmm, forgot about this thread, but I couldn't get the driver to install, I've done it exactly as they say to do it, and tried numerous other things, but I'm still getting an error that says "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software. Setup will not exit."

Any way to fix that?

 

i think we should install it manually from device manager? because if we uninstall the display adapter driver, there will be no display adapter listed there, and the "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software. Setup will not exit." message will appear.

I got a bluescreen installing with the setup. If i install it with the intel setup application, it means that my GMA950 driver is installed before it is being replaced by the 965 driver.

 

The GMABooster site looked good, and I was really excited. But when I downloaded the app, my antivirus detected 3 trojans! Needless to say, I deleted it, and will not touch it until someone verifies it is secure.

I would take a look at the GMA 965 drivers, but I would want someone else to do the modifying, so all I have to do is download something and install it. It looks too complicated as it is.

 

I've done numerous testing with the GMAbooster on my aspire one on vista ultimate.

Trackmania united forever - lowest, 1024x600
@166mhz 10.8FPS
@400mhz 11FPS

Counter-strike: source - high, 1024x600
@166mhz 5fps
@400mhz 5fps

Trials 2 SE - low, 1024x600
@166mhz 18fps
@400mhz 18fps

Looks like a terrible worthless program in all of my testing. I'm going to uninstall it now and keep trying the driver tweak.

 

That's too bad. I had high hopes for the GMA in the netbooks. Hopefully the driver tweak will be more promising. At least offer TnL support!

I will also test GMA Booster on my Eee 1000h just to confirm whether it is viable (after a thorough virus scan, it sounds like).

 

anyone managed to install the modified driver?

 

Apparently most people had problems with it working. Therefore, I'm not even willing to mess with it.

And as for the GMABooster having trojans, that's a double strikeout. I guess I'll just have to be happy with the standard GMA 950 until I pick up a Sager gaming laptop.

 

Hmm I can't get this to work either, I'm using windows 7. Does this completely replace my 945 chipset drivers? I am running the driver Intel(R) G965 Express Chipset Family driver for my video card.

GPU-Z is showing this.. is this working correctly?

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/937/945gm.png

Device Manager shows this:

http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/4613/devicemanager.png

 

Man, I am using this program for 2 weeks.

40 antivirus engines at www.virustotal.com detect nothing.

Program works for me, speedup in WoW is obvious.

No overheat, no stability issues.

I am not advertizing anything, I just do not like these 'virus talks'.

 

I'm downloading the just-released Mac version now. If it's OK, I may try it out on my Windows side as well. Could have been a bug with my antivirus software, for sure.

 

unknown555525 and Espionage724:

As you may or may not know the GMA 9xx series has a technology called Zone Rendering technology to save memory bandwidth. There are problems that it might drop out and not work in the mode or it may even deteriorate performance but quite a few games will benefit from it. The result is that it won't be fillrate limited and clockspeed increases won't bring that big of a benefit. If you do fillrate tests you can see that the GMABooster actually works.

As it stands the bottleneck is elsewhere on the GMA 950.

(of course some games that doesn't benefit much from Zone Rendering will receive decent benefits from higher core clock, currently the only way to know is try the app)

cephasara:

I have known this for quite a long time know but those applications do not actually read the clock speed of the GPU. They can identify the chip yes, but they only assume based on the data they(the programmers) have. Some of the info on GPU-Z is wrong.

 

Hey I'm trying to improve performance on my Intel 915GM/GMS Chipset
just wondered is the GMA Booster compatable with my chipset?!?
If not is they're any alternative ways to boost performance?
regards,
Ben.

ps - I got wow running at about 26fps just trying to see if i can get any more.

 

Well with my netbook, the bottleneck is the CPU in everything.

While I don't know how to overclock the aspire one, and if anyone can tell me how that would be great . But I did do tests comparing games with different CPU loads applied to the CPU with CPU killer. At even 5% cpu load, the framerate drop is completely linear in pretty much every game. The intel Atom just isn't fast enough for gaming, and that's where the verdict lies.

 

- avast detected no viruses in GMABooster

- I didn't notice that signifigant of a performance boost at all with GMABooster (maybe others will?)

- Modded drivers work best under Vista or Windows 7. Their are modded drivers for XP but they do little-to-nothing to game FPS.

- Modded drivers come premade or you can make them yourself. Different drivers give different results (some give amazing FPS boosts, others BSoD)

- Modded drivers only emulate Hardware TnL under Vista or 7

- GMABooster works on Windows and Mac

- 3D Analyzer can emulate Hardware TnL under XP.

 

I have a Vaio TZ (core 2 duo 1.2 Ghz 2GB ram with a FSB of 533)
The default GMA clock for the TZ is 200Mhz, setting it to 400mhz provided a highly noticible increase in performance on the two games I tested namely EA's battleforge and UT99.

Prior to GMAbooster:

UT99 on high settings on the native 1366x768 res even on the ingame "Turbo" setting wouldn't feel smooth and sudden turning jerked slightly.
Despite the fps counter saying it was around 59 fps.
However on 1024x768 gameplay was smooth (with same 59-60 fps)

EA's Battleforge
Everything set to lowest/off the scrolling around the world map was slow and crawling.

After GMAbooster on 400Mhz

UT99 on native res ran as smooth and silky as on 1024x768 with highest settings and on Turbo.

Battleforge map scrolling was smooth, also unit summoning effect didn't jerk around and was smooth as well. Very playable !

I haven't bothered to test video performance as with Core AVC the TZ is already able to play 1080P files without stuttering due to the core 2 duo processor being much more powerfull than an Atom.

Conclusion:

I have read many reports on these forums and there are configurations where GMAbooster will not help you, also since there are applications that are CPU bound GMAbooster wont help you there either.
But my own testing shows that for what it's worth, a TZ will see a noticible increase in gaming performance.

 

Im about to ge ride of my GMA950 after about 2 years hehe

anyways, still can play alot of good games like AoM

 

would this help the performance of X3100?

 

no, but the creator of GMAbooster is working on it.
Also if like me your GPU is already at 500mhz there will be nothing GMAbooster can do except underclock it.

 

+1. Can see to check plus some ideas on how to get better video performance here.

 

I read on a blog once ( cant remember where exactly ) that the latest drivers for the GMA945 already overclock the GPU to 400mhz... so you dont need the GMA Booster...

I am using a modified driver on my Toshiba A105.. and its running Guild Wars flawless without the GMA Booster, and have no lag at all at native resolution xD...

ohh.. and you guys can also try SwiftShader ... Click me for tuto =)
Some games run great with it while others, others are better without it.. -_-!