Intel 945GM Chipset drivers and the 950GMA (945GM) discussion

[espionage724]

I've worked with this card for many years. I tried Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, OS X 10.5, 10.6, and Ubuntu with this very card.

1. Software TnL. This feature alone would help many users run games. I've seen it possible to enable it in Vista and 7 via INF mods. This (from what Iexperienced) is impossible in XP, most likely from bad driver design.

2. Vertex Shaders. Intheory, this card doesn't support any Hardware vertex shaders. Yet your site says the card support Vertex Shaders 3.0 in software. Now intheory, any card in the world can use Vertex Shaders in software mode correct?

3. 950GMA with 965 drivers... Now this one has me amazed. Now if the device Id mod was applied for a 950GMA to have 965 driver files, it boosts the performance of this card by far, as well as enabling Software TnL and thus, emulation of Vertex Shaders 2.0 and this will let people play games made with a popular game engine, Source. The performance difference, Stock vs Mod, were talking easily a 10-20FPS difference just because of the SwTnL.

4. Now the chipset... ok so I downloaded the chipset drivers in zip format. Theres no driver files at all... just a bunch of INF files basically just saying to name the devices. So no improvements at all. Now this wouldn't bother me that much, but there is no SMBus driver? Now correct me if im wrong, but I'm certain that affects performance greatly when the driver is installed (at least it does on my old AMD machine). But why no SMBus drivers?

5. Updating the VBIOS. Not recommended by the user I know nor recommended in general. But I wanna do it. Now from what I researched, you must have access to a certain VBIOS tool, which is only given to OEM's. I have other ideas to obtain an updated VBIOS, but why can't the end user have this tool?

6. IEGD in Ubuntu. I have yet to see a simple guide to make IEGD drivers work in Ubuntu, which in fact should give better performance then the stock drivers that ship with Ubuntu

Please somebody take the time to read this message. I believe Intel is a good company, but from what I've seen in older graphics drivers, I just don't know... and the chipset drivers thing, that really started to drop my opinion there

[Doraisamy_G_Intel]

Hi,

Unfortunately, the driver for the platform you are using 945GM is no longer actively supported by Intel.

However, you did raise some valid points. I will forward this internally to our driver team to see if we can address your needs in driver releases for our current and future products.

Thanks,
-Ganesh

[espionage724]

Really? So no updates or anything can be done on this card or even Chipset drivers? I mainly only wanted some questions answered about the Chipset drivers and the other few questions I asked.