A few questions about integrated graphics

[Michel Dänzer]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 02:36 +0200, Roland Scheidegger wrote:
> On 19.08.2008 20:41, Chris Pemberton wrote:
> > My last question can best be asked using a specific example:
> > 
> > An Intel DG33TL motherboard has a GMA 3100 graphics processor built in.  
> > It can accept CPUs with a 1333 or 1066 or 800 MHz system bus, and either 
> > 667 or 800 MHz RAM.  Obviously if any graphics processing is offloaded 
> > to the CPU, clock speed, bus speed and ram speed are crucial.  But for 
> > graphic processing handled solely by the integrated GPU, will the bus 
> > speed or ram speed have any effect?  Or does the GPU communicate with 
> > the shared RAM at a "fixed" speed beyond the control of the system 
> > builder?   Did that make sense?  Will choosing the faster system bus or 
> > ram speed allow the integrated GPU to read/write to shared memory more 
> > efficiently?
> 
> Typically faster ram will help since the memory bandwidth the gpu can
> use goes up (since the memory controller is in the chipset).

Right, but note that IME probably the most important thing is to make
sure the memory controller can use all available channels. Faster RAM
using a single channel may be slower than slower RAM using multiple
channels. YMMV of course.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |          http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer