Intel i820 Chipset Review

Game Application Performance - AGP

We've already speculated that the i820's AGP 4x wasn't going to yield a huge performance gain in today's games. I've included results using Expendable Demo, Quake 3 Arena Test and Shogo. Each of these games was run at a resolution of 640x480x16. I used the lower resolution to keep the video board from being the bottleneck.

In Expendable the i820 has a minuscule lead over the i440BX platform. The VIA platform is over 8FPS slower the i440BX. This proves once more that VIA's AGP-implementation is still not up to speed with Intel's.

Under Quake 3 the i820 and i440BX run a tight race. The VIA platform stills holds a steady last place.

Nothing has really changed even with the Shogo results. Both the i440BX and i820 platforms perform almost identically. The VIA based system still tries to play catch up. Could the VIA board's performance be limited by their AGP implementation?