Intel X3100 users rejoice! It's finally here! New Pre-Beta Drivers

hi guys,tried the beta drivers under xp.noticed a slight (very slight) improvement in frame rate in c&c tiberium wars
-FEAR is worse than before and the graphics are distrorted with weird colours regularly.
-company of heroes is nicer in that the lighting effects are visible but loss in frame rate and regular green 'patches' on screen make it unplayable
-dawn of war-dark crusade-drop in frame rate...
also ran 3dmark06 and got a score of 604 with beta drivers and 621 with the old one...

my experience with the beta has been decreased performance in-line with the lower 3dmark score but also degradation in quality and level of support for both current and older games....the beta release is ****!!

 

I am very inclined to think right now its not the driver's fault but rather the hardware. I have tested the results with different configs and drivers, check it out: http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=129343&page=18

 

I don't know what you folks have been trying out, but I just installed the drivers and I saw a nice difference.

I wasn't even able to run Neverwinter nights 2, once i added the drivers I ran it nicely, sure there was a bit of lag, but I still went form nothing to playable.

 

True. Just saying its not enough. Compatibility has sure become better though. There is a benchmark for Supreme Commander that doesn't run on the G965, but sure does on mine with the beta drivers. It's playable in the lowest settings, hopefully the final driver will make it true for the higher settings.

 

if a nice difference to you is compatibility with significantly decreased performance, then sure the beta drivers are not bad, but otherwise, they really need to work on performance because the large drop is just unacceptable.

 

I was able to play CS:S @ 1280x800 with medium model&texture, low shader&shadow, no HDR or AA with pretty decent performance. I get about 25-40 fps which seems very smooth to me. Although, I do have problems with disappearing gun models, but hopefully that will be fixed by the final release.

 

Dude, run actual games, not 3dmark on it. At the worst, its not slower, and the compatibility is better. On CoD2, I noticed performance improvement from 14.31pb to 14.31b(of course the 14.29 doesn't run it at all).

What's good about the lower 3dmark scores are it will better reflect the actual performance, unlike the GMA950 which has high 3dmark scores and dismal game results.

 

Is it possible to revert to another non-beta driver from the beta drivers if the performance is unacceptible?

 

Arquis: Yes, I havn't done it but I know that many people have done it.

 

It's always possible to update/change a software driver.

 

So, you just download the driver you want and update the same way? Or do you need to do something else first?

 

uninstall current drivers, install desired drivers, hope that helps

 

non beta version for xp is out, supports VS 3.0 and seems to resolve many games issues.

testers needed

get it here :
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&ProductID=2800&OSFullName=Windows*+XP+Professional&lang=eng&strOSs=44&submit=Go%21

 

would love to test it out, but not running XP

edit:
just found a YouTube video with an Intel engineer showing what the X3000/X3100 can do now with the new 14.31 XP drivers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OogVYWQLAhM

 

10+ added frame rates seems good enough for me, as I never intended to do anything hardcore. And the fact that it switches b/w h/w and s/w vertex is pretty nice.
Now where's the vista driver ?

 

can you only use the new drivers with the x3100 gma or can you use them on the 950 aswell. sorry if its a dumb question

 

Only with the 965G, 965GM and G35 chipsets, so no, not with the GMA950, which is integrated as part of the 945G chipset.

 

The official 14.31 drivers are also the latest drivers for the GMA 950. However, they will only provide you with bug fixes since the GMA 950 doesn't have vertex shaders or a T&L engine to be activated in hardware.

 

Both are gud news for me coz going to buy msi pr200 ,
thanks a lot guys

 

no problem buddy, glad I could help a future fellow x3100 user

 

hey guys,

I'm about to buy a FZ140E which has the x3100. One last question to be answered: with the current status of the drivers, will I be able to play World of Warcraft with better performance than I used to do in my old laptop (GMA950)?

Thanks,
Marcelo

 

Than a GMA 950 yes. Even without the new drivers the X3100 would be faster simply because it's clocked higher and you'll likely be combining it with a faster processor.

 

i did the new 14.31 drivers for xp
but my farcry is all blue and dxdiag shows agp texture acceleration as not available
what is wrong?!

 

hi guys ..

my fz140EB came with a pre-installed graphics driver ... I played WoW for a couple of hours and even if it was kind of disappointing cause I didn't notice any improvement comparing with my old laptop (GMA950), it was at least playable.

today I decided to try the new Vista drivers and big was my surprise when I noticed that the game became completely unplayable.

just wanted to share my experience ... I'll downgrade for the previous version tomorrow ... =(

cheers,
marcelo

 

The new drivers only unlocks the DX7 Hardware lightning transfortion, wich is requiere for most games since 2 years AFAIK.

 

marcelo, the final drivers have not yet been released for Vista. if you really want to see that the drivers can do, you should downgrade to XP and install the new non beta XP drivers...

 

I'm glad I don't game on my x3100-equipped machine; for biz use, I can give a rat's patootie. Still, many people do (or try), and I think it's pretty inexcusable for Intel to take so long to release usable Vista drivers when the darned gpu was released post-Vista! It would be nice if the industry would just standardize CPU's with appropriate GPU's, keep the cost at least semi-reasonable and stop causing unwary consumers so much grief. For example, look at HP, with their hyping the "NVIDIA" Geforce 6150 SE ("sucky edition") as a "gaming" gpu, and putting them on top of the line lappies with top notch AMD processors. As if it's not bad enough that the card is darned close to being 4 generations old, it's hard-wired and uses 100% system memory! An ATI X1400 hypermemory would smoke that crap (I know, I have BOTH processors on lappies). Would it really have cost them that much more to put in a 7000 series card with 128 dedicated along with "turbo cache"? I mean, the difference street price couldn't be more than $30, for God's sake!

 

hey dude ... first of all sorry but I'm a little bit drunk and that might affect my ability to express myself .. hahaha

anyway ... I wish that was so easy ... but sony currently lacks support for XP drivers so that if I choose to downgrade to XP (which would be great) I wouldn't be able to use function keys and some of the power management stuff....

probably I'll give it a try next week ... but right now my work depends on my laptop so that I can't try it out ...

thanks,
marcelo

 

I know you'll be able to EVENTUALLY, but for gaming on Vista, the x3100 may not be on a par with the GMA950 with XP just yet (it may take Intel a while to finalize the driver standards). Which is pathetic, considering that the GMA950's went with 1.2-2.0 ghz Celeron M's!

 

dude ... I second that! sometimes I look into the laptops they make and I really can't understand their choices!!! I mean .... can't they notice all this people looking for portable devices with decent graphics card?? come on!!!

 

here are my benchmarks with the final 15.6 vista driver

3DMark2001SE
15.6 beta 4208
15.6 final 4310
15.4.3 5562
22.5% decrease in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark03
15.6 beta 1269
15.6 final 1710
15.4.3 1652
3.5% increase in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark05
15.6 beta 671 *Force software vertex shader off
15.6 final 882 *Force software vertex shader on
15.4.3 867
1.7% increase in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark06
15.6 beta 425 *Force software vertex shader off
15.6 final 493 *Force software vertex shader on
15.4.3 529
6.8% decrease in performance from 15.4.3, specifically because of decrease in performance of HDR/SM3.0 Canyon Flight game test

so there seems to be a huge decrease in DX8 games with the new 15.6 drivers, can anyone bench with some real world DX8 games to confirm?

 

Wow, thanks for doing all those benchmarks.

Do the 15.6 drivers actually add HW T&L and VS capability?

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/13878/ENG/relnotes_2k_xp_gfx.htm

The Release Notes for the 14.31 XP drivers were very specific in that it said in New Features that hardware VS3.0 has been added.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/14344/ENG/relnotes_winvista_gfx.htm

The 15.6 Vista drivers say no such thing. It in fact lists in Known Issues that HW DX9c fails in XP and Vista. (Although the 15.6 drivers aren't for XP so I'm not sure why they mention it). I suppose this either means that HW T&L and VS are supported up to SM2.0 but not SM3.0 or none of it is actually working and there are only bug fixes

 

Hey the final 15.6 driver for Vista works! I was able to run COH at the minimum setting and gotten about 30 FPS. Before that, the game freezes.

 

itcommander_data--- you are right, the new driver for vista doesn't say anything about VS3.0 but feels like just an update from last video driver. However the driver number is same as beta except this doesn't have beta at the end. So i don't know how the number works and may be I am wrong but I think this driver doesn't have any support for VS3.0.

 

no problem ltcommander_data, and I think you guys are right. the new non-beta 15.6 Vista drivers still don't seem to support Vertex Shaders as well as Hardware Lights?

here was someone's system info stats running the 14.31 beta drivers with 3DMark06:
Driver File igxprd32.dll
Driver Version 6.14.10.4842
Driver Date 6-8-2007
Driver WHQL Certified false
Max Texture Width 4096 px
Max Texture Height 4096 px
Max User Clipping Planes 6
Max Active Hardware Lights 8
Max Texture Blending Stages 8
Fixed Function Textures In Single Pass 8
Vertex Shader Version 3.0
Pixel Shader Version 3.0
Max Vertex Blend Matrices 0
Max Texture Coordinates 8
VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz

and here's mine with final 15.6 Vista drivers:
Driver File igdumd32.dll
Driver Version 7.14.10.1322
Driver Date 8-24-2007
Driver WHQL Certified true
Max Texture Width 4096 px
Max Texture Height 4096 px
Max User Clipping Planes 6
Max Active Hardware Lights 0
Max Texture Blending Stages 8
Fixed Function Textures In Single Pass 8
Pixel Shader Version 3.0
Max Vertex Blend Matrices 0
Max Texture Coordinates 8
VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
*no Vertex Shader Version appears in mine

the new non-beta 15.6 vista driver does have a slight improvement though from the 15.6 beta drivers as it adds Max User Clipping Planes (use to be 0)

 

LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) doesn't seem to work with the final 15.6 drivers. It worked on my X61 tablet BEFORE installing the drivers (using Lenovo's latest video drivers)

I get the error:

No suitable graphics device was found. Are you running througha remote session or a VM? If not, please check your video hardware capabilities. [122]

 

So prior to the latest driver, the x3100 was capable of SOFTWARE shaders, but now those are turned off as well?

Is this right? Why not leave software shaders on until we get drivers that utilize hardware shaders?

 

What? All drivers support software shaders. The new XP drivers added a hardware shader capability and the ability to choose between hardware and software shaders because there are cases where software shaders are still faster since the hardware path isn't optimized yet. The Vista drivers still don't appear to have added a full hardware path yet.

BTW, there is a new 14.31.1 driver for XP. Seems to be bug fixes only, but it'd be interesting to see if they've tweaked anything else.

 

So when do you think we will get new vista drivers? I don't want to wait until 2008...

 

if there's more talk like this on the internet, intel will do something about it eventually.

 

yep, just keep calling them:
http://www.intel.com/support/9089.htm
or emailing them:
http://supportmail.intel.com/scripts-emf/welcome.aspx?id=

and hopefully they'll get the message, here's the message I keep sending them if you would like to use it as a template:


Hello, according to http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-011910.htm
The Intel G35, G965 & GM965 Express Chipsets support hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L).

Also, according to http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intelg965/sb/CS-025665.htm
Intel is currently developing and validating drivers for the Intel® G965 & GM965 Express Chipsets that support hardware transform & lighting (T&L) and vertex shader functions for both the Windows* XP and Windows Vista* operating systems. Beta versions of these new drivers are currently available for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Production drivers are planned for release later in 2007.


So the productions drivers were finally released for Vista, but when I downloaded and installed the new non-beta 15.6 drivers, the GM965 still does not seem to support hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L) as well as vertex shaders.

here was the system info stats running the 14.31 XP beta drivers with 3DMark06:
Driver File igxprd32.dll
Driver Version 6.14.10.4842
Driver Date 6-8-2007
Driver WHQL Certified false
Max Texture Width 4096 px
Max Texture Height 4096 px
Max User Clipping Planes 6
*Max Active Hardware Lights 8
Max Texture Blending Stages 8
Fixed Function Textures In Single Pass 8
*Vertex Shader Version 3.0
Pixel Shader Version 3.0
Max Vertex Blend Matrices 0
Max Texture Coordinates 8
VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
which looks all good there, but:

here's the system info with the new non-beta 15.6 Vista drivers:
Driver File igdumd32.dll
Driver Version 7.14.10.1322
Driver Date 8-24-2007
Driver WHQL Certified true
Max Texture Width 4096 px
Max Texture Height 4096 px
Max User Clipping Planes 6
*Max Active Hardware Lights 0
Max Texture Blending Stages 8
Fixed Function Textures In Single Pass 8
Pixel Shader Version 3.0
Max Vertex Blend Matrices 0
Max Texture Coordinates 8
VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Memory Clock 0.0 Hz
Max VGA Core Clock 0.0 Hz
*no Vertex Shader Version appears in mine

the new non-beta 15.6 vista driver does have a slight improvement from the 15.6 beta drivers as it adds Max User Clipping Planes (use to be 0). However, support for hardware transform and lighting (T&L) and vertex shaders is still missing.

So I also did some benchmarks and here were my results:
3DMark2001SE
15.6 beta 4208
15.6 final 4310
15.4.3 5562
22.5% decrease in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark03
15.6 beta 1269
15.6 final 1710
15.4.3 1652
3.5% increase in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark05
15.6 beta 671 *Force software vertex shader off
15.6 final 882 *Force software vertex shader on
15.4.3 867
1.7% increase in performance from 15.4.3

3dmark06
15.6 beta 425 *Force software vertex shader off
15.6 final 493 *Force software vertex shader on
15.4.3 529
6.8% decrease in performance from 15.4.3, specifically because of decrease in performance of HDR/SM3.0 Canyon Flight game test

There seems to be a big drop in 3DMark2001 SE (DirectX 8.1). Can you please forward this email to the graphic driver engineers and ask them what happened to DirectX 8 performance with the new 15.6 drivers and what caused the decrease? Also, the 3DMark06 HDR/SM3.0 Canyon Flight game test suffers a big decrease in performance as well with the new non-beta 15.6 Vista drivers (using software vertex shaders, although the other DX9 tests did increase). If you guys could please fix these performance issues as well as add support for hardware transform and lighting (T&L) and vertex shaders in the next Vista driver release, that would be greatly appreciated by me and all the Windows Vista users out there who use Intel graphics.

 

Look at the 14.31.1 driver release notes: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/fil...XP+Professional&lang=eng&strOSs=44&submit=Go!

One of the things fixed.
"Automatic HWVP/SWVP selection can get stuck in SWVP mode"

That must be related to "HW DX9c fails in XP and Vista". So 14.31.1 is a bug fix driver but it fixes a rather problematic one.

Here's opinion on the 14.31.1 driver:
"In CS:S, (I'm using the De_dust2 map) The 14.31b just gave me 20 - 30fps, the same at the 14.31 drivers, and when I upgraded to the 14.31.1, I got a tad 25 - 38 fps, but when I bought the new RAM, it soared to 30 - 60 fps... Of course, I was using Dxlevel 81 (DirectX 8.1 mode) at that time... but when I shifted to 9.0, It tuned down back to the 25 - 38 fps mode, that was both with HDR and without. So, I just tune it down to 8.1 since there's no point of using 9.0 and I couldn't see HDR effects at that map. I would like to have a suggestion regarding a map in CS:S that has HDR..."

So its rather a significant improvement. I noticed a 50% improvement of performance in Company of Heroes with the driver.

Except I think 15.6 version of the driver has a worse problem than XP's. So you guys now must wait for the 14.31.1 counterpart of the Vista driver .

 

Anybody tried World in Conflict with the x3100?

 

yea, not good even at default setting, 15-20 FPS.

 

Is it true that the vista 15.6BETA drivers had vertex shader support but this was removed from the 15.6 drivers? If so, where can i find the beta drivers? They link on the main page does not work. Why would they REMOVE shader support...

 

I would guess that they somehow broke something in the 15.6 drivers at the last moment or perhaps the performance just wasn't comparable to the XP 14.31 drivers. The 15.6 driver was probably rushed to release in order to add support for the G35 desktop chipset with the GMA X3500 which should be released soon.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showpost.php?p=4252499&postcount=384

Kind of bad for Vista users, but XP users should be very happy with the new 14.31.1 drivers. The above was testing by a desktop GMA X3000 user with the new XP drivers. The config is a little bit better than most laptops, but CoH, C&C3, Supreme Commander, AoE3, and BF2 were all playable at around 800x600 or 1024x768 depending on the game. Detailed settings are in the link, but it seems Intel has finally figured out how to make a decent IGP and release proper drivers. Bioshock, World in Conflict, and Quake Wars all don't work, but there is hope that support will be added in the next driver release. Things only get better from here with DX10 support coming for the GMA X3100 and GMA X3500 in Q1 2008. (The latter of which was reiterated at IDF and the former in Intel PR documents).

 

Can someone upload the 15.6b driver somewhere? I cannot find it anywhere.

 

it is not true that 15.6BETA drivers had vertex shader support, where did you hear that it did support hardware vertex shaders?

 

Although Intel has removed the link, Google Cache catches everything.

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache...+intel+15.6b&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&client=safari

Scroll to the bottom.

The download link no longer works, but the description indicates that HW PS was supposed to be there for Vista beta. Now what's interesting is that similar to how I pointed out before that the official 14.31 XP driver had notes specifically stating that HW DX9.0c support was added while the official Vista driver had no such statement in it's notes, the same appears to be the case here. Clicking on the 15.6 beta Vista release notes yields no reference of new features, yet the 14.31 beta XP release notes does mention HW VS2.x as a new feature. So perhaps you are right and HW VS was never in the Vista drivers to begin with.

 

Well does anybody have the 15.6b saved on the hard drive? If so, please upload it somewhere and give us a link.