Santa Rosa's X3100 not DX10?

Everything I've seen here and on other websites has said that Intel's newest integrated GPU, GMA X3100, is supposed to be DX10 compliant. Everything I see on Intel's website only mentions DX9.0c. Can anyone clarify this for me?

Here's the link to Intel's Mobile Intel® 965 Express Chipset Family Datasheet


-edit-

Here's what I've found on Intel's website about the X3100.

The (G)MCH graphics is powered by the Mobile Intel® GMA X3100, bringing new levels of richness and realism to DirectX 9 enabled applications. It supports eight programmable Execution cores, enabling greater performance than previous generation chipsets.

The Mobile Intel GMA X3100 has two independent display pipes.

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 offers an increased graphics core frequency of 500MHz @1.05V (in the GM965 vs. the previous generation chipset with a graphics core frequency of 250MHz) and up to 384MB of video memory.

Mobile Intel GMA X3100 supports:
• 32-bit full precision floating point operations, as against 24-bit in previous chipsets
• Up to 8 Multiple Render Targets (MRTs), further optimizing performance in
execution of instructions.
• Acceleration for all Microsoft DirectX 9 and SGI OpenGL 1.5 required features

Enhancements to the Texture engine include dynamic filtering of up to 16 samples in Anistropic filtering, as compared to a maximum of 4 samples in on previous chipsets.

Supports up to 128 bits of color for textures, including support for textures with floating point components.

Supports a Pixel shader 3.0 (for DirectX 9 applications)

 

Well they said it could run Vista Aero Glass (which is DX10). I think it is DX 10, and I also hope so.

 

Actually Aero glass is only dx9 that's why even a gma950 can run it. From what I've read, the x3100 is dx10 though I could be wrong.

 

Actually, Aero is run by DX9. If not, the current generation cards would not be able to run it.


EDIT: Ooops. We posted at the same time.

 

Sorry for my ignorance but does it even matter if the X3100 is DX10 compatible/capable really?

 

I thought Aero could run on DX 9 but Aero Glass was only DX 10. Could be wrong though.

 

I had Aero Glass enabled on my X200M without problem.

 

Aero is DX9.

Vista utilizes no DX10 features.

In all honesty, there is no point for the x3100 to be DX10. Its simply not going to be powerful enough to play DX10 games with DX10 features.

 

Well, if it was DX10, I think it's safe to say that Intel would advertise the fact.

If they say it's DX9, and various leaks and other 3rd party sources *once* said it was DX10, I'd be inclined to believe Intel. They ought to know. And their information is also the most recent.

 

As a few of you pointed out Areo Glass only requires DX 9.0c. The fact that Intel says it will provide "the highest level of Vista Aero experiance" (or somthing like that - not an exact quote) does not mean it is a DX10 part.

You are also correct that there is no way that the X3100 will be capable of playing any of the upcoming DX10 games that are commonly talked about (Crysis, etc). It probably won't Its just too weak of a card.

So does it really matter if it is DX10 compliant or not? Yes and No. It's performance with DX 9 games, DVD/DIVX playback and encoding are more important, but I was still hoping for a DX10 part. Bummer!

I generally keep my laptops for longer than most people (4+ years). I imagine 3 - 4 years from now the basic games that my kids will be playing will have moved to DX10 support. Stuff like Civilization, the Sims, Sim City, and the like - nothing too demanding, but it would still be nice to get the DX10 support.

 

It does support Aero but not DX10. Here's a brief overview of what's to expect in the Santa Rosa's:

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/components/0,1000001694,39286985,00.htm

 

That site seems to have some faulty information. I don't believe the GPU is clocked at 667MHz, but rather 500MHz. Still a nice overview for those who didn't know anything about Santa Rosa.

 

My next notebook (Fujitsu LifeBook T4220 hopefully) is going to have the Intel GMA X3100; I can't say that I care that the GPU is not DirectX 10 because as mentioned, it's not going to be that powerful anyway. I am not expecting it to play any games although if I can get Half-Life 2 running on it I'll be more than satisfied.

We'll have to wait until we see some real-life, solid benchmarks for this card before we judge it.

 

Intel are releasing newer drivers later this year that enable gpu processes through hardware rather then software, right? The showcase of those drivers showed the X3000 running Half Life 2 on high settings, so the X3100, let alone run it, should be able to run it at high settings too provided the drivers are ready by the time its released.

 

It's Direct X 9 at the moment. But the nature of the programmable pipelines means Intel can enable DX10 in a later driver release.

 

No, no, hold on! Unified (or programmable) Shader Architecture does not mean DX10 support - that still has to be supported by the GPU core architecture itself. U/PSA simply means that each shader can be programmed on the fly to act as either a vertex or pixel shader as needed, rather than having separate dedicated shader units for each type. Hence why although the XBox 360's GPU has Unified Shader Architecture, it does not support DirectX 10 - only 9.0c.