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Macbook graphics performance

j-a-x

j-a-x

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 15, 2005
1,584
291
Houston, Texas
I just got a Macbook 2.2 Ghz and I love it, but I noticed something kind of strange in my Xbench results when comparing it to my old 12" Powerbooks.

My oldest powerbook is the 1Ghz 12" model, and it gets an OpenGL graphics score of 36.29

My 2nd oldest powerbook is the 1.5Ghz 12" model, and it gets an openGL graphics score of 37.78 (not much better).

Okay now here's the surprising part. My new MacBook gets a score of 23.28, worse than the old 1Ghz powerbook from 2003 with only 32MB of VRAM.

I am wondering if there's something funky going on with Xbench, or is the performance of the GMA X3100 really that bad?

One interesting thing is, I noticed that Xbench does not report a video card under system info for my MacBook but it reports the 12" Powerbooks just fine. So it's possible it's not utilizing the hardware acceleration for the tests. Does anybody know for sure?

The MacBook blows the other two machines away in Quartz graphics performance (4x faster) as well as user interface performance (25x faster).
 
GMA X3100 has no good driver yet. Altho its still an entry level integrated graphic card, don't expect too much even with the future driver.
 
I heard that although the X3100 is an entry level card, it still has teh capability of performing better than the old 32 MB ATI card, so I except at least that sort of improvement in the future.


I looked at some xbech results online where people were getting scores of hundreds on older MacBooks. So why is my score so low? Does anybody else have a MacBook to compare with me?
 
Synthetic benchmarks generally don't mean much.

Xbench, 3DMark, etc. don't mean anything when it comes to actual real world performance.
 
There are quite a few interesting videos on YouTube. You can watch Macbook (mostly the previous revision with GMA950) running Doom 3, FEAR and other games. Even though most of them are on lowest settings it is not quite bad for an integrated graphic card.
 
Maagus said:
There are quite a few interesting videos on YouTube. You can watch Macbook (mostly the previous revision with GMA950) running Doom 3, FEAR and other games. Even though most of them are on lowest settings it is not quite bad for an integrated graphic card.
Click to expand...

Yep - I have a 2.2 Ghz MacBook that runs HL2:E2, Portal, and the like quite happily (as in, playable).
 
Okay, so it looks like they might release an OS update and a graphics driver update at the same time. That sounds good.

I understand benchmarks might not be the best way to test my graphics card, but if other Macbook owners are getting scores of hundreds with their X3100 and I am getting 20s, then something is wrong. What are other X3100 owners getting in xbench?
 
j-a-x said:
Okay, so it looks like they might release an OS update and a graphics driver update at the same time. That sounds good.

I understand benchmarks might not be the best way to test my graphics card, but if other Macbook owners are getting scores of hundreds with their X3100 and I am getting 20s, then something is wrong. What are other X3100 owners getting in xbench?
Click to expand...

Xbench is very random. It can vary greatly even on the second run on the same machine.

Better run some games for REAL benchmarks
 
Yes, the results vary per test, but not that much. I always get the same result +/- 5 or so.

So what's a good free game to test out the X3100 performance with?
 
I don't game with my MBP. Not even chess. I mainly use my Computer for VMs, Garageband, and internet.
 
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