Hello everyone,

Games such as Alien Arena, Tremulous, etc. are choppy on my dell 518 with Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100. The first menu is almost unreadable when I boot up the games. I am running 8.10 with 2GB RAM? Any help? Is there a particular Linux distro that works with my setup a little better?
__________________
Ubuntu 8.10/Intel Pentium dual-core processor E2200 (1MB L2, 2.2GHz, 800FSB)/2GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 800Mhz/Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100

UPDATE: I installed Fedora 10 and the X3100 is working just fine. I am also going to try Mandriva 2009.

Welcome to LQ,

First I would make sure direct rendering is on. So open a terminal or console and run this:
It should give you:
If it says that, then there is not much more that can be done, integrated Intel graphics is not really designed for games, I mean it can run the lower-end games just barely.

The problem here is that the X3100 isn't that good. :-). I actually opted to get one for my laptop instead of an nVidia dedicated solution because it'd take less power, but yea, it flickers with both Windows and Linux drivers. There's a lot of discussion about how the x3100 sucks here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...el/+bug/177492. You'll also be able to get a few ideas for performance tweaks there.

Here is an example:

http://picasaweb.google.com/oceanfirehawk/SharedPhotos#

P.S. - The picture was taken fullscreen. I don't know why it is showing the desktop.

Ah okay! That looks to me, from the screen shot, like a compiz-fusion / window-manager issue. Any second opinions?

I didn't have compiz enabled when I took the snapshot.