Revision as of 08:58, 11 December 2014

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 seem to be an excellent choice for a MythTV frontend.

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.

It is also known that the Intel Haswell Pentium (G3240) is able to deinterlace a 1080i MPEG-2 recording with approximately 20% CPU usage across both cores using the YADIF deinterlacer.

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"

The Haswell series processors have low power consumption and are able to reach approximately 20W on idle (G3240 with basic mini-ITX motherboard).

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

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 Experience Matrix

Below is the experience matrix for the Intel CPU with integrated graphics when using MythFrontend. Please report your findings (playback profiles etc) in the table and list any problems. Note that some entries refer to chipsets before GPUs were placed on the die.