So where does that leave the gamer who doesn't want to invest in a separate graphics card? According to Silva, you can still play "a high level of a game on an [Intel] seven-dollar processor." A game such as Guild Wars, for example, plays very well on a 945G chipset, he said. "We think the performance [with our 945G chipset] is acceptable for a mainstream gaming experience," Silva said.

However, Silva also conceded that Intel has no pretensions that its graphics processors are geared for high-end gaming experiences. Intel leaves the computationally-intensive graphics rendering tasks to the likes of ATI and NVIDIA's graphics cards.

"In a perfect world, I would like a game like Doom to play on our graphics part on very low and minimum settings," Silva said. "But if the customers really like the game, they would go buy a graphics card."