Integrated VGA & How Good Is ATi's Radeon 9100 IGP?

Test Setup

We compared ATi's new IGP 9100 chipset with integrated graphics with the candidates from our last comparison . Although some of the drivers used in that review have since become outdated, this should have little if any influence on the chips' performance, considering the performance level we're talking about here. Tests showed no improvement whatsoever with updated drivers. This can be explained by the simple fact that these chipsets have been in the market for such a long time that their performance potential has already been completely exploited by the drivers.

For reference, we compared the integrated solution with a $50 ATi 9200 graphics card which sports 64 MB of video memory and supports AGP 8x. Its 3D core is based on the same architecture as ATi's IGP9100 (RS300). To make clear what level of 3D performance is available today and what a role graphics performance plays in games we also included a Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB in this comparison.