X-bit labs

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 and Intel 915G: New Generation of Integrated Graphics (page 6)

Category: Chipsets

by Tim Tscheblockov

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

Performance in Gaming Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo

The new chipset from Intel runs Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo at the medium settings well enough, outperforming the i865G by a factor of 2.5 or 3 – it hits the level of the RADEON 9100 IGP and nForce2 IGP.

At the low graphics quality settings, enabled for the maximum speed, the results of the i915G seem to be limited by the speed of geometry processing and polygons sorting, since the chipset doesn’t practically lose its speed switching from 800x600 to 1024x768. Accordingly, the i915G is noticeably slower than the leader, the nForce2 IGP, in the first resolution, but matches it in the second.

Max Payne 2

The test scene from Max Payne 2 demands no extraordinary texturing speed, but likes hardware T&L. The results of the i915G don’t differ much in the two resolutions, so the non-standard approach to processing geometry is again a brake to GMA 900. As a result, Intel’s new GPU lost its leadership to the graphics cards and integrated chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA that have hardware T&L and vertex shaders support.

The situation doesn’t change as we switch to the “speedy” settings: again, GMA 900 is impeded by its geometry processing speed.