Integrated Graphics Performance: It's all in the chips

Quake 3 Team Arena

While Quake 3 may be getting on in years, many games that appear today are still based on heavily modified versions of its engine. Since examining performance in each of these games would go beyond the scope of this article, we'll use Quake 3 as a representative of this "class." The OpenGL engine does not use any shaders and only supports T&L in parts.

We tested with detail levels set to the maximum using a timedemo we recorded ourselves.

Even in this ageing game, the i865 and SIS651 were unable to achieve performance worthy of the title playable. NVIDIA's nForce 2, on the other hand, performed remarkably well and could even overtake the Radeon 9200 at higher resolutions, albeit by a slim margin. That this is still miles away from the current high end was borne out by the Radeon 9800 PRO.