>> Hello, >> >> I'm looking at a Dell Vostro 1720 Laptop with this Intel video >> chip: Intel® Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD >> >> Anyone with any experience or comments as to Intel's video >> offerings, as far as it related to (X)/Gentoo on the laptop >> are most welcome. > The software support for Intel graphics itself is pretty good. They > have in-tree DRI drivers and X drivers and support for GEM and XRANDR > 1.3. IIRC Keith Packard works both on X11 development and the Intel > drivers so you get a lot of support software-wise. > > As some have reported Intel Graphics cards don't perform as well as > other competitors in 3D graphics. It's fine though for people like me > who aren't gamers and need powerful graphics hardware. I use > GNOME/Compiz and things work pretty exceptional (except for the Blur > plugin in Compiz; there's no hardware rendering support; you'll want to > disable that). >
My experience matches this. If I try to run composite rendering, X eats my CPU time to the point that I can't even use the system for practical purposes. I have a 945GM Intel video card. I had tried compiz-fusion through kde3 last year, but the performance was much to jittery and slow, so I removed it. I tried to upgrade to kde4 this week, but again X was eating CPU time and making the whole machine run hot and slow. I can't be 100% sure it was the video card and composite rendering, but I believe it was the problem. So I switched to xfce and now I'm happy. So, if you want to run 3D graphics and composite rendering, maybe not intel? ~daid
