X-bit labs

ATI RADEON 9100 IGP Integrated Chipset Review (page 4)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/01/2003 | 11:02 PM ]

As for 3D, the ATI RADEON 9100 IGP is undoubtedly the most advanced integrated chipset of today. For example, it is the only one to support DirectX 8. The NVIDIA nForce2 and Intel 865G cannot boast this quality as they only support DirectX 7. In order to put things in a perspective, I have built a table with the graphics core of the RADEON 9100 IGP set against the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core from the i865G:

I think the table is self-explanatory: the ATI RADEON 9100 IGP is beyond competition as far as functionality is concerned. It is also one of the strong points about ATI’s chipset that it is highly compatible with a majority of games. Added the support of the ver.1.4 pixel shader, RADEON 9100 IGP can handle most of the current games (I hope you are aware that the i865G cannot run quite a number of computer games).

As for the performance of this graphics core, ATI tried to boost it up by optimizing its operations with the memory. Modern integrated chipsets are allocated graphics memory from the main RAM. Thus, the graphics core becomes yet another active consumer of the memory bus bandwidth. That’s why graphics data compression technologies are heartily welcome. This may provide a hefty performance gain, since performance of Unified-Memory-Architecture chipsets in 3D is often limited by the low memory speed.

The RADEON 9100 IGP has an exclusive and curious thing to offer: Surroundview. The mainboards on this chipset can work with three monitors if you use an external graphics card. That is, the chipset-integrated graphics core remains enabled even after you install an external add-on graphics card. The most peculiar thing about this technology is that it doesn’t actually work, although some mainboard makers have been advertising it hard. There arose some problems with its practical implementation, so the mainboards on the RADEON 9100 IGP to arrive in the near future will force the disabling of the integrated graphics after installation of an AGP 8x card.