Intel GMA incompatibility issues

The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (Intel GMA) hardware was introduced in 2004 and began being phased out in 2010. Very common in netbooks, low-end laptops and desktop. Computers marketed to businesses not requiring much graphics capability also may use Intel GMA. Designed to be a low-cost graphics solution (including 3D acceleration) integrated into motherboards. It does not use dedicated memory and relies heavily on the host CPU for most graphics functions. The GMA X series and SGX series alleviates much of the host CPU use if the game developers make games that tell it too (this hardware can actually dynamically shift processing between itself and the host). Proprietary drivers (for proprietary systems only), compensate for lack of graphics capability and run games with graphic deficiencies. non-Proprietary drivers needed to be created with deficient information. Although Intel released code for its drivers, they failed to publish details of how certain aspects of the hardware worked. In order to make certain games run, Linux users could run an alternative drivers that would allow games to run and be playable. These typically sacrificed other graphics features. They could cause the mouse cursor to be invisible at all times, loss of multi-monitor support, no video playback for certain players and formats, no DVD playback. Workarounds for losing some of these these other features were possible. For reasons of quality assurance and support, several releases of Ubuntu removed all support for certain Intel graphics hardware. Using these releases of Ubuntu with the affected hardware meant users were required to override many aspects of their operating systems to manually install Intel drivers and some cases require compiling multiple components from source.