Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900 vs vs Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900

The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (also known as GMA 900) is an integrated (onboard) graphic chip on the Mobile Intel 915GM chipset for Intel processors. It does not support hardware T&L (Transform & Lightning) calculations (which is required for some games).

It supports DirectX 9.0 with Shader Model 2.0 (Vertex Shader are calculated in Software - by the CPU) and OpenGL 1.4. Furthermore, the chip is able to accelerate the decoding of MPEG2 videos and supports Motion Compensation.

The GMA 900 can not be described as a graphics card that is sufficient for gamers. Still Intel published a list  of games that will run (not needingly beautiful) on the notebook. Some old 3D games and especially 2D games should run without problems. The advantage of integrated graphics cards, is that they have a low power consumtion and therefore save battery life. Furthermore, the laptop may stay cooler and more silent than laptops with dedicated graphics cards. For office programs and surfing the performance is more than sufficient.

Currently there are no drivers that support Aero Glass for Windows Vista.

Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core

The Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core is an integrated graphics card for ARM based SoCs. It supports Android, Windows Mobile 6, Windows CE and Linux and the standards OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 2.1, OpenVG 1.1, and DirectX 11 (9_3). The chip is can be clocked with up to 600 MHz (28nm LP) or 800 MHz (28nm HPM). The theoretical calculating power of the GPU is 50 Mio triangles / s, 650 Mio pixels / s and 12 GFLOPS (according to cnx-software.com). According to Vivante however the GC1000 is capable of 345 to 460 Mio triangles /s and 11 to 15 GFLOPS.