I have a Sony Vaio vgnfw140e with an Intel Mobility 4500MHD video chipset
I’m using 11.2 and it’s always worked great, I’m impressed with the out of the box support for all the oddball hardware laptops have, but lately I’ve been messing with blender 3D a lot and wondering if I’m using the optimum video driver. glxgears gives me a framerate of about 350. Doesn’t Intel cooperate pretty well with the linux community? Do they supply a driver that may be superior to the out of the box one?
Now that xorg.conf disappeared I’m not even sure what driver I’m using.
openSUSE-11.3 will have a newer kernel, newer Intel driver, and newer Xorg, which should work well with your relatively new Intel Mobility 4500MHD. If you look at the Thinkwiki for the Intel Mobility 4500MHD you will read that
KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) is a recent development, and requires that you have at least kernel 2.6.31 and Intel Xorg driver version 2.8. But newer is better. With the 2.6.32 kernel and Intel Xorg driver 2.9 you can expect full functionality including external displays and 3D acceleration.
Linux driver UMS
[QUOTE]NOTE!
UMS (User Mode Setting) where the mode setting is done by the Xorg driver in user-land is deprecated and newer versions of the Intel Xorg driver (v2.10+) no longer support it. Instead you will have to use KMS (Kernel Mode Setting)
Make sure your using Intel Xorg driver, version 2.8 or 2.9. [/QUOTE]Note openSUSE-11.2 has only the 2.6.31 kernel (which does not have the superior functionality that is in the 2.6.32 and newer kernels).
You can tell by looking inside your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file.
Note the older openSUSE-11.2 comes with the 2.6.31 kernel, with the Intel-2.9.1 driver and xorg version 1.6.5. On the other hand the newer openSUSE-11.3 will come with the 2.6.34 kernel and the Intel 2.12.0 driver and xorg version 1.8.0. There are many Intel driver fixes in 11.3.
Why not download an openSUSE-11.3 liveCD and test out the graphics?
>
> Hi Folks
>
> I have a Sony Vaio vgnfw140e with an Intel Mobility 4500MHD video
> chipset
> I’m using 11.2 and it’s always worked great, I’m impressed with the
> out of the box support for all the oddball hardware laptops have, but
> lately I’ve been messing with blender 3D a lot and wondering if I’m
> using the optimum video driver. glxgears gives me a framerate of
> about 350. Doesn’t Intel cooperate pretty well with the linux
> community? Do they supply a driver that may be superior to the out of
> the box one? Now that xorg.conf disappeared I’m not even sure what
> driver I’m using.
There are no alternative drivers for Intel graphics. What you get is
the best that exists (at the time of release, that is).
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Minas Tirith))
I’m playing with blender on RC2
some actions that were a little clunky under 11.2 are way smoother now (like resizing windows)
I tried glx gears which gave me a much slower frame rate (around 60) but there’s a clear warning right there saying not to use this for comparison
Xorg.0.log says I’m using the intel driver so things look petty good
thanks for the pointers
Glad to read the RC2 live CD ( ? ) is running better. I think next week, when the 11.3 GM hits the street, if you install it, you may find a hard drive installation a bit faster than a liveCD installation.
There always a handful of regressions in every Linux distribution version update.
My experience thus far on 6 completely different PCs (3 nVidia, 2 ATI, 1 Intel graphics) is that openSUSE-11.3’s graphic implementation is superior to 11.2 on 4 of 6 PCs, the same on 1 of 6 PCs, and worse on 1 of 6 PCs. … Thats pretty much the same case/statistics for another well known distro I also checked for graphics improvement. This was with openSUSE-11.3 RC2