Far Cry

The “gaming tests” section of this review ends with the most visually advanced games that make an extensive use of DirectX 9 shaders. Far Cry employs DirectX 9 shaders, so we exclude the previous-generation chipsets from our tests, leaving only the graphics cards with GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA.

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 suffers a bitter defeat. Considering that its results in the two resolutions differ but slightly, the problem is not in the speed of execution of pixel shaders. GMA 900 just finds itself smothered under the huge amount of polygons Far Cry throws at the graphics processor.

The situation improves considerably in the “speedy” mode, but the i915G is still slower than its rivals.

Halo

Halo is not generous in fine-tuning settings, most of them have two positions only: On and Off. That’s why I couldn’t select settings that would be “medium”. So we have two modes in Halo: maximum quality and minimum quality:

The i915G did quite well in the high quality mode, falling just a little behind the RADEON 9550. Halo has fewer polygons per scene and is overall a CPU-dependent game, and the power of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz came in handy here.

It’s the same at the “speedy” settings: Graphics Media Accelerator 900 with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition outperforms the GeForce FX 5200 and is just slightly slower than the RADEON 9550.