When, oh when, will better GMA 3600 drivers be released?

[KHans13]

I recently bought a refurbished Atom N2600 netbook for playing retro games on the go. I was disappointed to find that the GMA 3600 graphics couldn't give me playable framerates in Motocross Madness 2 and Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D. Furthermore, AssaultCube, one of my favorite shooters, crashes evey time I try to play it. (AssaultCube Reloaded does the same thing, unsurprisingly) I've heard somewhere in the Intel community that drivers are coming, but I have to ask: when?

[ABors1]

The discussion with Imagination is interesting.

Did you get a price indication of the DDK/license?

[agree11]

Hi Arthur,

Thank you for your comments, I agree it is interesting, however the price issue is a serious issue. I would imagine we would be looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars as a minimum, bear in mind that Intel have licensed this and this company normally works with major producers. Now it would help significantly if others of you could reply to the same post, and at the very least give some idea of continuity. Because so far the only posts on Imagination Technologies (IT) site are of people ranting about the situation, which particularly with IT will have no effect, we need gentle persistent requests, and some subtle suggestions that this is not good for their image, regardless of what the legal situation is. I have read elsewhere (phoronix) that (IT) have a bad reputation in the Linux community for not providing open source drivers, so don't expect quick results...

Now there is something we can do with what IT have, they have a SDK for software developers, this has a windows simulation option, it may, and I state very unsurely, it may be possible to reverse engineer this somehow. I have to add that I think this would break every rule in the book, so don't come running to me if someone starts knocking on your door. Now I know very little about programming and even less about graphics drivers, my only conversation was with my dad who played with this kind of thing 15 years ago, and even then it was a bit of a dark art. So we should go into this situation with very low expectations, if we are able to reverse engineer a driver into a state where it does not crash the computer then this should be seen as a success. I would expect that this effort could take many months or possibly even years.

If there is anything in this post that contravenes the forum rules, please contact me and I will be more than happy to edit or remove this post entirely, I never intentionally try and break forum rules. This discussion as a whole is a delicate area...

[agree11]

And to cheer everyone up have a look at this post, we are not the only ones in the same boat...

[agree11]

I've posted a new question, this is not specifically about drivers, or the situation with Atom just now, but I think it is relevant to the position we are all in. I hope this will get Intel to reverse their decision to withdraw support for the Atom processors we are using. Please write informative comments, particularly about the length of time you feel would be suitable to allow users to change their hardware. I hope common sense will force Intel to change their minds.

Thanks in advance,

Alasdair

[VHALI]

Microsoft and Intel are making a lot of mess with this GMA 3600's problem on metro apps (actual driver version is 1091). I had to move from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 8 32-bit because you can't purchase Windows 7 licence anymore (Windows 7 starter is totally inefficient). I could use Windows 8 32-bits on desktop mode only because of Intel GMA 3600. Now it's time for upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and you can only do this on the metro apps Windows Store... I could wait for somebody to discover a way to make work this chip, but the offer for upgrading from Windows 8 licence to Windows 8.1 will expire in January 2014.

Microsoft and Intel together against the customers to make you buy new device by artificially obsoleting a notebook that I bought 9 months ago. Thanks a lot ! And thanks to Asus that provide Eee PC 1025CE with Windows 7 Starter, this things is useless since I bought it and could have been great if it wasn't so painful to gain the right combination. It will be very soon easier to work on Linux OS with AMD/NVidia hardware !

Actually Lubuntu is doing very well on this Eee PC.

I hope I won't need Windows and Intel again !

[powerarmour]

VinceDisapointedIntelCustomer wrote:

Now it's time for upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and you can only do this on the metro apps Windows Store...

Ouch, didn't think of that one before, that's an utterly horrible bug for GMA 3600/3650 users due to the fact that all Metro/Modern UI apps crash with the current driver. You can't upgrade to 8.1 even if you wanted to...

[Clp]

http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/8-news/24-intel-chipset Station-Drivers - Intel (Chipset)

I found this site with the drive of Atom z2760 (clove trail) and i saw that

the drive has de same names but i can´t install them.

Can someone mod this drive to work on GMA3600?

sorry for my english!!!

[Kevin_M_Intel]

Hi Xaman,

At this point Intel® currently has no plans for releasing Windows 8* graphics drivers for GMA 3600. If they may be available, be sure that this will be announced.

For more information on Microsoft* Windows* 8 driver availability, please refer to this article:

http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-033838.htm http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-033838.htm

[MH9]

Are you a robot that keeps repeating the same things over and over again? Please enlighten us, why no plans for releasing an updated driver for this GPU? Why?

[msols]

exact: why there are no plans to make a driver?. It is a technical impossibility or is a neglect of the direction.