Integrated Graphics Performance: It's all in the chips

Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT 2003 is a well-known last-generation first-person shooter. Simply put, the 3D engine is an extended DirectX 7 engine with a few DirectX 8 features added on. In some cases, like terrain rendering, the engine already uses pixel shaders v1.1 or v1.4, depending on hardware support. The "Unreal Engine" is under constant development, always being improved and tweaked. Over the last few years, several games using various versions of this engine have been published - see wiki.beyondunreal.com for more info.

We ran this benchmark using the highest detail settings available to put as much strain on the graphics capabilities as possible. The benchmark we used here was the integrated Antalus Flyby timedemo.

Intel's i865G makes a very poor showing in UT 2003 - although SIS' 651 isn't much better. Only NVIDIA's nForce 2 can "keep up" with the Radeon 9200. At 1600x1200, the Radeon 9800 PRO is about 31 times faster than Intel's i865G. Even at 1024x768 that factor is still 13. Only the framerates offered by the nForce 2 IGP can be called playable.