Can I run Compiz-Fusion on an Intel GMA 950?

[Loffe]

Hello,

Mission: I am going to buy myself a new laptop.

Problem:
As far as I know nvidia has the best drivers for linux. But it's hard to find a (cheap) laptop with a GeForce...

Most of the machines I've looked on has a graphics card from intel and it's named GMA 950.

Question: Can I run Compiz-Fusion on this chipset?

Thanks,
Loffe

[Jupiter]

From the hardware compatibility list. Which is outdated by the way.
* Intel 950GMA
o Chipset: Intel Corporation Mobile 950 GMA Integrated Graphics Controller Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
o Driver: X.Org/6.9.0 (Bleeding edge drivers might have some optimizations)
o Notes: Works great. However accelleration seems to be disabled for everything except Xgl features. This chipset is in the Apple MacBook.

[Fyda]

Hello, Loffe!

At first, I assumed I would get poor performance on the seemingly baseline Intel GMA 950 (specifically, Intel GMA 945GM) in my laptop (an ultraportable, definitely not for gaming). But, it turns out that this card works very well with AIGLX and the i810 driver (as autodetected by Ubuntu, anyway). If I avoid Blur and the more resource-intensive effects (eg. Burn or Explode animations, or Transparent Cube), everything is almost guaranteed to be smooth and lively.

You might also find the following things interesting/useful:
the maximum texture size is 2048x2048 (applicable to skydome images)
the driver used to lack pixel shader support, so Water could not render; now, Water works but Blur is broken (showing noise instead of the correct blur buffer)
Wikipedia has the details of this card organised into a table, here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_graphics_media_accelerator#Table_of_GMA_grap hics_cores_and_chipsets:81bf7)

With the current/recent state of ATi and NVidia video drivers, I have a newfound appreciation of this Intel card, because it seems to have saved me a lot of trouble. (It's definitely less of a headache than the ATi on my desktop PC.) At the same time, it's still not ideal for getting the full, no-holds-barred eyecandy experience. For that, you are probably right in wanting an NVidia card.

Alternatively, have you considered getting a laptop with one of the newer Intel GMAs?

[Stryik]

Given that Intel's newer lineup of GMAs (as given by Fyda in the post above) have significantly better performance than the older models, it wouldn't be a bad choice to choose one of the later models, such as the X3100 (which happens to be included in Dell's new Inspiron line for Ubuntu). Just remember that (IIRC) the texture RAM on any Intel GMA is all shared, so have a healthy amount of RAM available. 2GB should suffice.

[Jupiter]

Loffe if this is solved for you please prefix the thread title with [SOLVED]. This will
help other users to find this solution when doing a search in the forum. You can edit
the first post in the thread to edit the title.

Thanks
Jupiter