Intel’s contribution into the sphere of integrated graphics has been rather poor compared to the mighty rivals like RADEON 9x00 PRO and NVIDIA nForce2. The speed and functionality of the Extreme Graphics 2 core from Intel is no match for the current integrated GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI – our recent review of contemporary integrated chipsets confirmed this point.

In spite of the alluring name, Extreme Graphics 2 is obsolete with its one pixel pipeline and two texture-mapping units (I won’t mention VIA or SiS today – their currently available integrated graphics cores are downright hopeless). It is like the long-forgotten TNT chipset from NVIDIA. Like the TNT, Extreme Graphics 2 has no hardware support of T&L as well as shaders.

Intel seemed to give little thought to that; Intel’s integrated chipsets never lose to their competitors in other capabilities, while high-performance integrated graphics must have been less interesting for the company.

This situation has changed after the arrival of LGA755 CPUs and a new family of PCI Express-supporting chipsets: the i915G chipset boasts a new integrated graphics processor called Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, and this is the first integrated chipset to have hardware support of DirectX 9 shaders.

Now, let’s discuss this and other facts in more detail.

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900: Functionality and Features

So, Graphics Media Accelerator 900 is an integral part of the Intel 915G chipset, which supports the PCI Express bus and DDR2 memory. We tested the i915G chipset using a D915GUX mainboard from Intel:

Data transfers between the graphics core and memory, both on standalone graphics cards and with integrated chipsets, are performed in rather big chunks, so higher memory frequency is more important than the timings. That is, the use of DDR2 memory, which works at higher clock rates compared to DDR SDRAM, provides an additional performance reserve to the integrated graphics processor: as usual, Graphics Media Accelerator 900 uses some part of the system RAM as graphics memory.

The i915G features a dual-channel memory controller, and ideally, when there’s no load from the CPU, GMA 900 can exchange data with the “graphics memory” at a speed of up to 8.5GB/s. The 128-bit “graphics memory bus” and 533MHz memory frequency are good parameters even if we compare them to mainstream discrete graphics.

Let’s now focus on the graphics core alone. The following table compares the two generations of integrated graphics from Intel:

The table doesn’t include the characteristics of the integrated GPUs as concerns video playback and output, but it is anyway clear that Graphics Media Accelerator 900 is not a development of the existing architecture, but a new GPU from ground up.