X3100 driver hell

Hello all,

I own a laptop with the GM965 Express chipset, a Celeron 530 and 1.5 GB DDR2-677 memory. Now i purchased this laptop because i read that it had descent features in the X3100 onboard graphical accelerator, but right now i have no idea which features are enabled on the X3100 and which are not.
Basically I've run Windows Vista home basic on the laptop with the 15.44 drivers and it ran games like Warcraft 3 and Black and White 2 in low settings acceptable. With the 15.6.1 drivers the games runs at much lower fps. I tested out the same games on XP with the latest and the previous drivers for the X3100, and again the previous drivers ran much better.
What on earth is up with that? I've been eagerly waiting around for new drivers that would enable some of the features that the card supports but does not utilize due to the drivers and maybe get some more fps, but the new drivers makes the games unplayable.

 

I wonder if the software detects the additional facilities offered by the new driver, enables those to give higher quality appearance but the final result is to run more slowly.

John

 

Well now that you mention it, Black and White 2 does look better with the new drivers, even with settings at the absolute minimum, than with the previous drivers. But Warcraft 3 doesn't look different at all and still runs unplayable and it's a game from 2002.

 

It's likely fault for Vista. Have you ever heard of both Nvidia and ATI's GPUs suffering performance hits in Vista over XP?? Have you also heard of Vista-running UMPCs(Ultra Mobile PCs) having bad performance only to find out users got significant performance boost and lower response times??

In regards to visual quality Warcraft 3 won't get any better because Blizzard is known for making games that runs on majority of systems. However, Vista screws it up. I know its Vista's fault because I am running XP with a desktop X3000, and I don't have plagues like you guys do.

 

Mine is even worse, I'm forced to run older drivers, as the latest 15.61 won't run, the installer tels me it's not the appropriate driver for my computer.
Currently, Intel's driver information tells me I'm running:
Driver Version: 7.14.10.1253
I'm unsure what version those are, I'm more comfortable with Nvidia and ATi driver versions.

Specs:
C2D T5250 @ 1.5GHz
1GB DDR2-533
Intel Express 965M chipset
Intel X3100 graphics
120GB HDD
Windows Vista Business
The model is the Dell XPS m1330, this is the most basic model, if that helps at all.

 

Dell released the 7.14.10.1253 drivers on 7/11/2007 which likely means it's a custom build of the Intel 15.4.4 drivers that were released on 7/02/2007.

As to why WC3 has problems with newer drivers that is strange. WC3 doesn't make use of DX7 generation T&L or PS or VS, which are features that the newer drivers are trying to address. I can only guess that Intel is having to redesign significant portions of their driver to get hardware T&L and VS to work and so whole sections of the older driver like DX6 multitexturing probably need to be reoptimized. Hopefully, in their haste to get hardware T&L and VS out, Intel doesn't end up forgetting there are other aspects of the driver that may end up being the bottleneck.