X-bit labs

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 and Intel 915G: New Generation of Integrated Graphics (page 3)

Category: Chipsets

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 07/12/2004 | 09:12 AM ]

Testbed and Methods

The i915G-based system was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3400MHz CPU (800MHz FSB);
• Intel D915GUX mainboard (Intel 915G chipset);
• 2x512MB Micron DDR2 SDRAM, 533MHz.

I’ll compare the i915G chipset with available integrated chipsets for Socket 479 and Socket A platforms that I reviewed in the previous article: ATI RADEON 9100 IGP, RADEON 9000 PRO IGP, SiS661 FX, Intel 865G, NVIDIA nForce2 IGP, SiS741 GX and VIA KM400. I tested these chipsets using a Pentium 4 3000MHz (800MHz FSB) and Athlon XP 3000+ (333MHz FSB) CPUs and 2x512MB TwinMOS PC3200 (CL2) memory.

Like in the previous review, I didn’t ask for the impossible from the integrated graphics by using extreme gaming modes. I just used the games’ medium and low image-quality settings in 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions:

• The “Medium Quality” mode uses average graphics quality settings and 32-bit color depth of the frame buffer. This is a compromise between speed and image quality in games.
• The second or “Low Quality” mode uses the lowest graphics quality settings and 16-bit color (in games that allow setting this color depth) to achieve the maximum fps rates.

When running synthetic tests and games that use DirectX 9 shaders, we took the cheapest of the available DirectX 9-compatible graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA: RADEON 9600, RADEON 9550 with a 64-bit memory bus, GeForce FX 5200 and GeForce FX 5200 with a 64-bit memory bus.

Unfortunately, PCI Express analogs of these cards were unavailable as of the time of our tests, so we tested AGP products – it is clear that the results of the cards will be mostly determined by the performance of their GPUs and memory, rather than by the speed of the CPU or the system overall since we used very powerful configurations.

The i915G-based mainboard doesn’t support the AGP, so we plugged those graphics cards into a differently configured system:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CPU;
• ASUS K8V-SE mainboard;
• 2x512MB TwinMOS PC3200 CL2.5.

I’d like to emphasize the fact that the tested graphics cards vary greatly in their performance level among themselves: RADEON 9600/9550 compete with GeForce FX 5700/5700LE in the market, rather than with the GeForce FX 5200. However, we chose these cards since they are the cheapest products from ATI and NVIDIA with hardware support of DirectX 9 shaders and are potential rivals of the i915G on the transition to the PCI Express bus. My point is that you shouldn’t compare the cards among themselves: they are potential competitors to the i915G, not to each other.

Now, the testing environment is clear – let’s proceed to the benchmarks.