From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 17 2011 - 00:50:43 CDT

Hi,
  Historically, AMD has had much better linux drivers than Intel.
>From a hardware perspective, while the Intel HD3000 might run better
for the benchmarks that notebookcheck uses, I have serious doubts
about that the same would be true for VMD. VMD uses a lot of OpenGL
features that have been shown to be poorly supported by the
Intel Linux drivers. In my view, I would not currently recommend
anyone to buy laptops with Intel graphics for this reason. Even under
Windows the Intel drivers have a history of being inferior to the drivers
produced by either AMD or NVIDIA. Graphics chipsets made by
AMD and NVIDIA are much better choices for people using applications
like VMD that use complex OpenGL features. Maybe one day Intel will
get their drivers sorted out, but I probably get 4 to 8 emails per
month from people using Intel graphics chips that have problems due
to various OpenGL driver bugs.

Cheers,
  John Stone

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 10:09:01PM -0700, Gianluca Interlandi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am wondering which one is faster for VMD in Linux, Intel HD3000 or ATI
> Mobility Radeon 6310? I am comparing here the Thinkpads X120e (with AMD
> Fusion E350 Processor) and X220 (with Intel i7).
>
> According to notebookcheck, the Intel HD3000 should be faster:
>
> http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-3000.37948.0.html
>
> However, those benchmarks are run under windows and the Linux drivers are
> not quite there yet:
>
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_hd3000_winbuntu&num=1
>
> In particular, mesa 7.11 is not available in all distributions yet
> (although ubuntu has it).
>
> Does anybody have any recommendation or experience with one of these
> graphics chips in Linux?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gianluca
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca_at_u.washington.edu
> +1 (206) 685 4435
> http://artemide.bioeng.washington.edu/
>
> Postdoc at the Department of Bioengineering
> at the University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
> -----------------------------------------------------

-- 
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