Nothing helping you out here? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/suppo … ss-chipset.html

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-15, 17:26:

Nothing helping you out here? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/suppo … ss-chipset.html

It looks like there're drivers for XP 64bit and the some for Win 7 64bit under the G31 page link but not that latest version (these are still dated 2009).

It looks like reading around the official forum that the latest WDDM 1.1 drivers were available on Win Update tool. In fact now they appeared on it and I'm trying to install them now.. mhh.. let's see how good or bad they will run.

They work even if I was expecting better results for such iGPU; at least power wattage is lower without a PCI-E video card, the system on idle demand only 45 watts vs the previous 57 watts with the GT610 and under stress it ask like 30 watts less. They came with Windows Update only as I read in a thread on the official Intel forum. Benchmarks obviously suffers compared to both the Geforce 210 and GT610 but power wattage went down a bit. At the end until I'll get a better video card having this or a GT610 is not that different.. maybe the mainboard will last longer without a PCI-E powered when there's the onboard one (GMA4500 of the G41 chipset) that anyway works. Strangely DXVA reports h264 decoding up to 1080p but I think it's an error of the driver reading, I don't think the G41 chipset support such decoding.
The Win 8.1 GUI seems to works quite good.. old benchmarks like 3DMarks seems much slower than the GT610 but not too much (2500 on 3DMark05, 3800 on 3DMark03, 8500 on 3DMark2001 SE more or less with a fast Core2@3,3Ghz).

Update for anyone might need to install this on modern o.s. The latest drivers seems indeed the MS Windows Update WDDM 1.1 version installed automatically for the G41 Express into Win 8.1 x64 but it doesn't come with OpenGL support for what I see. Not even Half Life 1 would start on those drivers while Direct3D works just fine. I looked around and it seems to be a known problem of these old combination of hw/sw and while there's some fix I didn't try I find that after installing the WDDM official MS version and trying installing again the latest (I don't find really the latest one from a trusted manufacturer board so I used the latest ASRock support version) and they install and stays there after the reboot. WIth these Win 7 drivers, OpenGL 2.1 (reported by GPU-Z) now works just like Direct3D. Chromium based browser seems to not like the different drivers for acceleration and requires to skip the unsupported gpu list flag to use the GPU.
Anyway now Half Life 1 works with both D3D an OGL. 😉 GPU-Z still says WDDM 1.1 and I can't see many differences beside having its Control Panel tool that wasn't available with the Win Update driver.

Another interesting thing I wasn't expecting is that with some stressing benchmark like Unigine Valley that should not use much the CPU anyway, the power wattage at the wall even with the on board iGPU goes up to 84 watts maximun from 47 watts idle (both GPU and CPU that clock down to 2Ghz from 3,33Ghz). Considering the iGPU should be under the main chipset compact heatsink I wonder how is possible that it demand so much power staying @ 40°C by the mainboard sensor. Obviously the test is too much for such iGPU but interesting anyway.

I can confirm too that with Unigine Valley my Core2 E8600 run @ 30% more or less as expected so the power demand peak comes from the iGPU. Let's hope the heatsink is enough and the mainboard sensor is close to the chipset and not somewhere else. 😉

EDIT: also Unigine Valley in OpenGL doesn't work cause it gives a GL_ARB_map_buffer_range not supported feature error.