17 Facts About GMA 900

GMA 900 line of GPUs replaces the earlier Intel Extreme Graphics, and the Intel740 line, the latter of which was a discrete unit in the form of AGP and PCI cards with technology that evolved from companies Real3D and Lockheed Martin.

Original architecture of GMA 900 systems supported only a few functions in hardware, and relied on the host CPU to handle at least some of the graphics pipeline, further decreasing performance.

The 4th generation of GMA 900 combines fixed function capabilities with a threaded array of programmable executions units, providing advantages to both graphics and video performance.

Many of the advantages of the new GMA 900 architecture come from the ability to flexibly switch as needed between executing graphics-related tasks or video-related tasks.

GMA 900 was the first graphics core produced under Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator product name, and was incorporated in the Intel 910G, 915G, and 915Gx chipsets.

Related searches

GMA 900 950 was the second graphics core produced under Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator product name, and was incorporated in the Intel 945G chipsets.

The GMA 900 X3000's underlying 3D rendering hardware is organized as a unified shader processor consisting of 8 scalar execution units.

GMA 900 X3500 is an upgrade of the GMA 900 X3000 and used in the desktop G35.

The GMA 900 X4500 is used in G43 chipset and the GMA 900 X4500HD is used in the G45 chipset.

The GMA 900 X4500 is used in the G41 chipset, which was released in September 2008.

The GMA 900 4500MHD is used in the GL40, GS40, GM45 and GS45 chipsets.

GMA 900 is theoretically capable of running Windows Vista's Aero interface and is certified as DirectX 9 compliant.

The Intel GMA 900 is the first Intel integrated GPU not to have support or drivers for Windows 9x operating systems.

Performance and functionality of GMA 900 processors are limited, attaining the performance of only low-cost discrete GPUs at best and very old DirectX 6 GPUs at the worst.

The GMA 900 X3x00's unified shader design allows for more complete hardware functionality, but the line still has issues with some games and has significantly limited performance.

Review conducted in April 2007 by The Tech Report determined that the GMA 900 X3000 had performance comparable to the Nvidia GeForce 6150.

Reviews performed by The Tech Report, by ExtremeTech and by Anandtech all concluded that the AMD's Radeon X1250 integrated graphics solutions based on the AMD 690G chipset was a better choice than the GMA 900 X3000 based on the G965 chipset, especially when considering 3D gaming performance and price.