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I just found out about GMABooster for OSX which supposedly boosts performance for the Intel GMA 950 in my Mac mini.

As anyone used this? Is it spyware? The site seems real but at the same time seems a little bit untrustworthy.

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GMABooster is most likely just snake oil: it promises a lot but delivers very little. It won't have any real, tangible results. And this bit of information from the site seems rather weird:

The gift is, a given Number, once entered, permanently disables the expiration date check

It's free, I can use it how much I want but it expires? What gives?

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  • it isn't exactly snake oil ... but nothing to write about either.
    – Molly7244
    Sep 28, 2009 at 19:55
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    I've yet to see software like this really improve performance noticeably. Maybe it's just me, but I don't really buy into this :)
    – alex
    Sep 28, 2009 at 20:03
  • as i said, it does improve the performance in certain scenarios, but i wouldn't bother with it.
    – Molly7244
    Sep 28, 2009 at 20:14
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I've tried it, and could get no change in benchmarking using either OpenGL Viewer or XBench (though I don't really trust XBench much for its graphics tests). I have no idea why changing the frequency has absolutely no effect on the OpenGL performance, but that was my conclusion on a Macbook...

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GMA Booster wont uninstall from my computer as NIS2010 DEAMS it to have suspicious activity.

Turned fire walls off and it wont uninstall.

I noticed no benefit what so ever with this program. I'm using 1000he Windows 7 Ultimate with 2GB memory and 4GB flash as ReadyBoost. The GMA Booster (2.1 I think) was buggy and shot to pieces. The most dramatic thing it did was make a white block appear on my desktop. Strangely no diagnostic program detected any change in memory clock and it is argued on the gma booster website that this is normal as the clock speeds test is innacurate.

Sounds like one big joke and yes snake oil. I need to clean my system of this crud now.

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It works, just not as much as many would hope:

As you can see, the GMABooster application did actually work. It simply overclocked the GPU from its default 166MHz to 400MHz. At 400MHz, the performance of the GPU on 3DMark06 was about 86% higher than before we ran the application. The performance gains are certainly not earth shattering, but they are gains nonetheless and could make the difference between playing some games and not playing them. -TweakTown

The bottom line is that many are ricing their underpowered system, hence the reports of it not doing anything. It does quite a bit, but it won't magically support things like H.264 decoding, geometry processing, transform, lighting, nor advanced vertex shaders (I jacked some of that from the Wikipedia entry for the GMA 950).

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GMA booster only worked for certain intel graphics chipsets. These chipsets usually were desktop chipsets, downclocked and installed in mobile devices like laptops or netbooks, to conserve power and limit heat.

In my case, the Gma chipset ran at about 200Mhz, and it would allow me to play games at 800x600 pix.

My screen was 1280x800, but stock the game could run at 1024x768 pixels at or below 20fps (just below fluid framerates at the time). Running GMA Booster would allow me to clock back up to (from memory about) between stock and 400Mhz. At max frequency the chipset got too hot, but at around 275Mhz I could get between 20-30fps at 1024x768 pix.

So yes, it does work.

It's not an overclocking tool, its just an underclocking tool that allows adjusting an underclocked chipset to levels close to their actual designed (desktop) performance.

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Didn't know it is available for macOS. Does Apple build computers with Intel's integrated graphics???

Anyway, it is not spyware, but the results are rather questionable and improvements are limited to very few programs/games.

Over at eeeuser.com, there are a couple of threads where GMABoster is discussed (incl. benchmark results), e.g. here.

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  • Well, yes, they do use Intel integrated graphics. Macbooks, for instance, have an Intel X3100 graphics processor (which is actually a GMA 945).
    – alex
    Sep 28, 2009 at 19:47
  • i remember when it first was released, it generated quite some hype in the netbook scene (the kids were dreaming of Crysis on their netbooks :) but it never delivered. the developer, a Russian, wanted to charge $$ at first but later i became freeware (well, that was the last i heard).
    – Molly7244
    Sep 28, 2009 at 19:58
  • My 2007 mac mini has Intel GMA 950, which is why I asked.
    – bentford
    Sep 28, 2009 at 20:48
  • alex-X3100 is not GMA945. It was a moderate upgrade to GMA 950
    – MDMarra
    Sep 28, 2009 at 22:19
  • FWIW, eeeuser.com is dead. It’s a parked domain now. No idea what is best policy on how to link to it.
    – Giacomo1968
    Nov 15, 2023 at 20:08

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