Revision as of 20:04, 25 September 2010

Intel Graphic Media Accelerators (or GMA) are integrated GPUs commonly found on Intel-based motherboards. Their performance, and their driver support in x.org, have been improving at a steady pace for several years now; as of 2008, Intel's drivers are open-source, and are generally agreed upon to be excellent in quality and well maintained by Intel and Tungsten Graphics, who are now two of the most significant contributors to x.org.

Because of their well-maintained, open drivers, and presumably because of low power consumption (compared to discrete GPUs on PCIe cards) and adequate performance, Intel GMAs would seem to be an excellent choice for a mythtv frontend; unfortunately, little is known about how well they actually work.

If you have any experience with these GPUs and mythtv frontends, please post it here so others can benefit from your experience!

Performance

With the release of the GMA X4500, the 3d performance of Intel GPUs is now within reach of Nvidia's integrated offerings. (see Notebook Test News auf notebookjournal.de - Praxis - Exclusive: Intel Centrino 2 Performance Test) This would seem to indicate that an X4500 is more than enough for typical Myth front end duties.

Power Consumption

Users and reviewers often claim that their Intel GMAs have very low power consumption. There seems to be consensus, at least, that integrated GPUs in general (including the Intel GMA) are much more power efficient than discrete ones.

See:

• http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200802-green.ars/5
• http://groups.google.com/group/mupen64plus/msg/2c1a94660624f863
• Google search: intel (gma OR integrated OR x4500 OR x3500) watts idle "power consumption"

Intel GMA setups known to work as a MythTV frontend

• The Intel Mac Mini: see Installing MythTV on an Intel Mac Mini using Ubuntu
• The Acer Aspire One netbook
• Asus P5E-VM HDMI, Intel 82G35 Express Integrated Graphics Controller / Intel G35. (Judaz 14:57, 2 February 2009 (UTC), see User:Judaz#xorg.conf)
• Asus P5QPL-AM, Intel G41 chipset (X4500 graphics), with Pentium Dual Core E6300. 1080i MPEG-2 content shows 45% CPU usage when using the "High Quality" playback profile with Kernel deinterlacer.
• HP/Compaq DC7700 with Dual Core CPU, Intel 82Q963/Q965 integrate GMA. Handles SDTV just fine using xv-blit and XvMC enabled in xorg.conf. It keeps up well with 720 streams. 1080 streams occasionally skip and audio drops in attempts to keep up with stream.

Known Issues with MythTV

The release of the 2.7.0 intel-xorg drivers should resolve previous issues with tearing. Xv-blit should now function acceptably. These drivers should also fix the green hue previously experienced with the opengl video renderer.

See:

• Intel_DG965OT

Intel GMA Feature Matrix

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