why is there an intel GMA X300?

i hope i got the name right up there on the title, but why would someone want to get an integrated graphics card that is DX10 compatable? Integrated cards suck, and im sure someone isnt going to be playing a DX10 game on an integrated card...

so im basically asking is this integrated card better then the previous integrated cards?

 

It is a bit better. Not much, dont expect to game well at all on it.

But I would still suggest to go with an ATI or Nvidia offering.

 

my guess is no, it's probably just there so that intergrated can stay on the market when DX10 becomes dominant.

 

alright, that makes sense then... and i wasnt gunna get it anyway i was just curious, lol, integrated graphics yuck eh? (well unless you guys said it was awsome)

 

It's not THAT bad... Intel isn't axed on gaming graphics.

The Nvidia integrated aren't horrible.. I use it for some gaming and it works fine.

 

Intel makes A LOT of money on their integrated cards, far too much for them to lose market share on DX10.

 

People complain too much about integrated cards about being sucky and gaming and the like.

They weren't made for gaming. They're made for people who just need them to display internet, web, word, DVDs, and the like.

And they do that well.

 

The performance of the Intel X3000 could match or even better the performance of the ATI X300 in some tests, which is very impressive in my opinion.

 

Integrated cards are good for what they are designed for. There are millions people who use their notebooks for business and they don't need anything more but video card capable for office/internet related tasks and movies, which will not reduce the battery life.

Integrated cards don't suck. However, there are people who buy these cards with intension to play the latest games on them..so yeah these people do suck since they haven't done their homework, obviously.

 

I agree with most of your comments (they are not meant for gaming), but they some time suck for even non gamers. Good example is GMA900 and Vista Aero support. I’m still not sure why Intel wont release a WDDM driver for it (heard somewhere that it is missing some hardware scheduling feature, but I don’t buy that story). It is very capable card and meet all of Vista’s Aero requirements other than the bloody WDDM driver!

 

Sorry but I disagree here. You cannot expect the GMA900 to run Vista Aero when obviously it wasn't designed for that. It just lacks of hardware support, afaik. Other than that, who says that it should, did Intel promise you that ?, I don't think so.

And, if Microsoft released an Aero 2 tomorrow, and GMA950 didn't support it, would you say that the card suck? I don't think so.

Read it here:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-023606.htm

 

Well, the GPU would be good enough for the Aero GUI and other Dx10 graphics features. Intel have around in a 50% share in mobile graphics, and besides, it makes sense.

Sure, you cant play DX10 games such as Crysis on that chipset, but the power consumption would be low, and buisness users could use Office 2007 on the move, togeather with other Vista applications.

With the release of the GeForce 8800, I somewhat get the impression that they are targeting different areas of the Dx10 market. Not everyone wants a powerful beast thats power hungry with mountains of processing power.

 

Well….. it depends on how you look at it. I'm not trying to argue with you or anything, just saying what I feel.

In early 2006 when Vista Aero first came out, requirements were: DX9, PS2 and 128MB VRAM (still they are same, except of course the WDDM driver). GMA900 supported all that. Who knows, maybe it wasn't just a coincidence; maybe MS gave Intel their basic requirements very early on but faced some difficulties at the end. Ok now we know it needed more specific hardware features than that. Whether MS gave intel Vista requirements early on or not, if they had just put a little bit more effort in to making a decent card, this wouldn't have happened.

I'm sure Intel knew about this issue long before Vista even became Beta 2, but did nothing to warn the public. Instead they started selling GMA900 with Vista capable logo! This was long before the whole “Vista Premium Ready” logo / idea came out, so at the time no one had any reason to believe that GMA900 won't run Aero. I'm not saying that Intel lied, they didn't; because they never said that GMA900 would run Aero. Neither said that it wouldn't, I say they knowingly misled the consumers with their Vista Capable logo to sell off remaining Pentium M notebooks. At the end of the day, this whole Vista situation and how Intel handled it sucks.

Depends on how you look at it. If a 1&1/2 year old VGA card can't handle the next generation OS desktop graphics, I would say that pretty much sucks . You are entitled to your opinion . Personally; I'd stay away from any integrated cards.


BTW pardon me for for going off topic

 

I have the 910/915 chipset and was hoping a while back to upgrade to Vista with Aero, but of course found out differently. So I'll just have to live with XP for awhile.

 

Well, I don't know what exactly the truth is but probably both Intel and Microsoft played their part in that story.

Other than that, there is a thing named "Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor" which said the GMA900 would run Vista, then accidentally this advisor changed its "mind", maybe it wasn't just a coincidence...You will never know anyways...

As for the marketing part, all companies do similar things, that's a dirty game...not that it's good but that's the reality and Ati, Nvidia, and all others play the same game very well, things like suffixes, card numbers, tricks about the amount of shared vs. dedicated memory...so they are all the some. You don't expect that Intel can be something different, do you?

As for Vista, that's the first Miscrosoft OS that is graphics intensive, so it happens, and surely that will hurt some people who probably have been in the wrong place at wrong moment...or it's just that Intel and Microsoft didn't like each other so much at that moment and that's the result.

Either way, I don't think that Intel will sell less IGPs due to this story or Microsoft less Vista copies.

And, I would not use this story to make general conclusions about integrated cards. These cards will always have their huge place on the market and that's not something that is going to change any time soon.

Of course, people have their opinions.

 

Has anyone heard the story with the lakeport drivers? I hear when you install vista, it come with these"lakeport drivers" which you can change your intel graphics driver to these intel lakeport drivers, and somehow it enables vista Aero!