GMA 900
The 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.
The 3D architecture of the GMA 900 was a significant upgrade from the previous Extreme 3D graphics processors. It is a 4 pixel per clock cycle design supporting DirectX 9 pixel shader model 2.0. It operates at a clock rate ranging from 160 to 333 MHz, depending on the particular chipset. At 333 MHz, it has a peak pixel fill-rate of 1332 megapixels per second. However, the architecture still lacks support for hardware transform and lighting and the similar vertex shader technologies.
Like previous Intel integrated graphics parts, the GMA 900 has hardware support for MPEG-2 motion compensation, color-space conversion and DirectDraw overlay.
The processor uses different separate clock generators for display and render cores. The display unit includes a 400MHz RAMDAC, 2 25-200Mpixel/s serial DVO ports, and 2 display controllers. In mobile chipsets, up to 2 18-bit 25-112MHz LVDS transmitters are included.
[edit]
GMA 950
The GMA 950 is Intel's second-generation Graphics Media Accelerator graphics core, which was also referred by Intel as 'Gen 3.5 Integrated Graphics Engine' in datasheets. It is used in the Intel 940GML, 945G, 945GU and 945GT system chipsets. The amount of video-decoding hardware has increased; VLD, iDCT, and dual video overlay windows are now handled in hardware. The maximum core clock is up to 400 MHz (on Intel 945G, 945GC, 945GZ, 945GSE), boosting pixel fill-rate to a theoretical 1600 megapixels/s.
The GMA 950 shares the same architectural weakness as the GMA 900: no hardware geometry processing. Neither basic (DX7) hardware transform and lighting,[2] nor more advanced vertex shaders (DX8 and later) are handled in the GMA hardware.
