I wouldn't try any 3D gaming on Intel GPUs, except maybe old games on the Intel HD ones.

Have you tried locating Intel GPU drivers?

I had to run Unreal2 on a single processor. Have you tried that?

Grab the MS ACT and select the SingleProcAffinity option
or just start it from a shortcut that looks like:
cmd.exe /C "START /AFFINITY 1 /D "D:\games\Unreal2\System" Unreal2.exe"

I've run Unreal 2 on GMA 900. It looked OK but this was my EEEPC 900 and it ran too slowly on there. GMA 3000 is similar to the 9xx series AFAIK.

There is little to try for fixing it. Intel poorly supported those IGPs. Maybe there are older drivers?

CPU affinity shouldn't matter. I rather recently beat the whole game on a Core i7 with a Radeon 5770 and it played fine.

Try fiddling with some 3d settings in the gma control panel.

HunterZ wrote:

I wouldn't try any 3D gaming on Intel GPUs, except maybe old games on the Intel HD ones.

I think you're right! (read on)

HunterZ wrote:

Have you tried locating Intel GPU drivers?

Sometimes I can be a little slow! I checked the Compaq/HP site and there was a slightly newer driver, which fixed the missing graphics issue.

Of course, like an idiot, I thought that this meant I'd now be able to play the game. The first firefight I get into, the game crashed! More specifically, the POS graphic driver crashed. I hit the power button and when the system finally started shutting down, there was an error box telling me that the Intel graphic driver had ceased to function.

I rebooted and tried it again, got past that fight and it crashed in a different spot. Apparently I'm not going to be able to play any commercial games until I get a dedicated graphics card.

swaaye wrote:

I've run Unreal 2 on GMA 900. It looked OK but this was my EEEPC 900 and it ran too slowly on there. GMA 3000 is similar to the 9xx series AFAIK.

There is little to try for fixing it. Intel poorly supported those IGPs. Maybe there are older drivers?

Why did Intel even bother to add 3D support and features like pixel shaders when it clearly can't handle them? That's like adding racing slicks to a go-cart.

They were probably aiming for Aero support and maybe some video decode acceleration and not much else.

I think for the GMA 3000 the latest driver is 8.15.10.1930 aka 15.12.75.4.1930 for Windows 7/Vista.

I've always preferred Intel graphics in laptops if you care about stability and not burning your skin off.

This has changed greatly in the past year or so with the newer Nvidia\AMD mobile graphics with Nvidia\AMD actually providing mobile drivers and their cooling being much better.

Intel HD is MUCH better than their previous graphics chipsets....but still shit compared to ATI/Nvidia.

Rekrul wrote:

Why did Intel even bother to add 3D support and features like pixel shaders when it clearly can't handle them? That's like adding racing slicks to a go-cart.

I think I read somewhere once that Intel GMA 3100 was somewhere in the vicinity of the older nVidia FX5600 in terms of performance and FX5600 wasn't all that great even when it was new. Even in older DX9 based games, your system is going to struggle. Just because a video card supports a particular feature set in hardware, doesn't mean it will support those features well. nVidia laughably described the FX5200 as a DX9 compliant card, but it only is if you find playing games at 1fps acceptable.

GMA 950 and newer can run Aero, which requires DX9 support, and you can probably bet on that being the main thing a GMA does. Clearly that is something Intel absolutely had to support.

You guys gotta remember that most people don't game, let alone play 3D games on PC. If Intel builds a really monster GMA that only benefits 10% of users that is very wasteful. Plus there's the ever present memory bandwidth bottleneck that is impractical to workaround for the same reason.

If you want to see a beastly IGP, look at the game consoles. Of course they are pretty behind the times right now but that's temporary.