Vivante GC1000+ Dual-Core vs ATI Radeon HD 3100

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.

ATI Radeon HD 3100

The AMD ATI Radeon HD 3100 (without the Mobility brand) is an onboard graphics card by AMD for the Turion X2 (Ultra) CPUs. It is built in the RS780MC chipset and is basically a HD 3200 with a slower clock speed and some reduced features (some sources say reduced video accelleration). The clock rate and feature set can be different depending on the laptop model. E.g. core clocks of 300 and 350 MHz have been reported by GPU-Z (Hd 3200 up to 500 MHz).

The 3D performance is similar to the HD 3200 one and therefore relatively good for an integrated chipset (much faster than the GMA 4500MHD and a bit beyond the GeForce 9400M). For older or less demanding games the performance may be sufficient.

Using Windows XP, the HD 3200 seems to have problems with current and older drivers, as there is no 2D accelleration. This leads to very slow interactions with windows and scrolling (especially with Firefox as reported in various discussion boards). More information on the topic can be found at Planet 3D Now (de) or the AMD forum.