Revision as of 19:21, 24 August 2008

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

Known Issues with MythTV

Unknown

Intel GMA Feature Matrix

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