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Integrated 3D Graphics Motherboard Round-Up
Keefe writes "In the recent past, integrated video was seldom a viable solution for hardcore computer gamers. Enthusiasts shunned from motherboards with integrated video, and opted to buy ones without it, in additional to a much faster ATi or Nvidia-powered graphics accelerator. Today, the picture is beginning to change. The last few integrated motherboards sported decent graphics chipsets, like the Nvidia NForce (GeForce2 MX), ATI IGP320 (Radeon VE), or Intel 845G. Techware Labs has taken a look at the current integrated 3D video chipsets on the market and concluded how they perform in the latest 3D software."
The submitter makes it sound like these integrated video platforms are good enough for gamers. WTF? At no point in history, including now, have integrated video accelerators offered acceptable performance for current games. Sure, these things might run Quake 3, but they better, seeing as it's so many years old.
True gamers are never going to use integrated video, when even the cheapest of new videocards spank them in all terms of performance, and most joe blows don't need anything approaching good 3d performance in their integrated video, because their activities consist of emailing and web surfing.
These motherboards are trying to fill a niche that doesn't exist. Power users will ignore the integrated video, and normal users (if they have any say in what goes into their box) will get cheaper integrated video solutions that don't cost as much as 'supAr fast 3d shared memory game integrated 3d card things'.
Regardless of the level of chip you put into an integrated motherboard no serious gamer will buy this...
If for no other reason than upgrade-ability. What's they point of intergrating the latest chip when a year from now (in the gamers mindset, and the games development) that chip will be out-dated...
and from a manufacturing standpoint you will be left with motherboards that are too expensive for the low-mid end user and useless to the high end gamer...
All arround pointless....
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
The motherboard in our DB machine at work has an ATI Rage chip integrated. Especially useful for rendering our logs in 3D. It doesn't support vertex shaders, though, so the lighting on the timestamps is kind of shoddy.
The problem is that graphics accellerators undergo a major increase in performance about every 6 months - they increase in speed FAR faster than Moores law would lead you to expect. (There are several good reasons for this that I won't go into here).
Hence, it's almost certain that you'll want to upgrade your graphics card before your CPU, memory or motherboard which are all plodding along at Moore's law rates (or slower in the case of memory).
Worse still, the integrated chipsets are always at least one or two years behind the cutting edge of graphics technology - and often share RAM with the CPU which slows everything down still further.
So - would you buy a motherboard where the CPU and RAM couldn't be upgraded?
No?
Then WTF would you want an integrated graphics chip?
The ONLY reason to do this is to get a cheaper PC in the first place - but if you buy one of these ultra-cheap boxes, remember that it's graphics are a year or two out of date on the day you bought it.
Fortunately, it's usually possible to plug a real graphics adaptor into these motherboards and have it automatically override the built-in chipset - but since you nearly always want to do that, the extra expense of the built-in chipset is a waste.
www.sjbaker.org
Don't be elitist. There are plenty of gamers out there that can't bloody afford the latest and greatest, much less upgrade every two years (6 months?). Some folks are actually interested in knowing what the best integrated video is, even if it doesn't compare to your Robocop 6000 SUX.
If only they had a sample of the NVIDIA nForce2 to compare. Then again, maybe they did -- anyone seen a mirror? I loaded their page once, it linked a supposed mirror, but it was for a 40x CDRW review...
Sure, it still may not be enough for you 'hardcore gamers'...
but Shuttle computers and nVIDIA are planning on releasing an integrated GeFORCE 4 MX motherboard. This will be particularily cool for shuttle itself, who makes relatively small (and attractive) barebones systems. Not having to leave space for an AGP card will help them a lot. (btw- I have nothing to do with either of these companies)
Their joint press release
Also, I don't think the purpose of these integrated cards is generally to keep gamers happy, they'll want to upgrade every few months anyhow. Integration is there to make it cheaper for the rest of us to get decent graphics on a cheap box.
Like another poster pointed out, integrated motherboards aren't targeted at serious gamers. They're targeted at average people.
Some of the early-generation ones didn't come with an extra AGP slot or a way of disabling the on-board options, but that seems to have been fixed now.
True, you might not find 5.1 sound or AGP8x/GeForce4 4400 performance, but if you consider who these motherboards are targeted at, it's good enough.
Just a comparison in Singapore:
Motherboard + video card + sound card >= 400
Integrated motherboard >= 185
http://cyclonite.stanford.edu/~eswierk/mirrors/40x _burner_roundup/index_1.shtml
put the what in the where?
Does anyone know of motherboards that have an DVI output for their integrated graphics? As a fan of low-noise low-cost computers I am interested in motherboards with integrated graphics, but I need a DVI connector.
You tell em brother. Please label that flaimbait because it is.
I built a system for my mother and one for her friend. Immediately I looked for integrated video. Its cheaper. Its more "integrated" thus requires less maintainanace in the form of drivers.
The original post must have been written "tongue in cheek." Their is no way integrated video will EVER be viable for the gamer. If it is ever viable for the gamer, it will cost too much for the primary audience...our non-gaming family members.
There are many arguments in this thread about "gamers won't by this because of this and that and this..."
Guess what? We all bought these integrated systems, it's called a ps2, gamecube, or xbox.
So it's slightly different under the hood but the idea is the same. And you know what, as a gamer I appreciate the simplicity of consoles.
There will always be hardcore enthusiasts who will buy the big, bad, best stuff. That's a certain market. However, as an electronics manufacturer with a payroll you've got to follow the bell curve and shoot for the group within the bell, right?
I think the more products that speak to the whole range of computer users and gamers is a good thing.
Oh yeah, better integrated chips mean I won't always get stuck with the sh*tty 11mb shared card in that crappy dell l800 when purchasing gets cheap on the next upgrade.
You can play Everquest, Ultima Online (3D client,) America's Army, Warcraft 3, all Sims versions, and every half-life mod known to man with a GeForce2 MX and an Athlon 1 ghz quite nicely. It may not be as pretty as your more powerful cards, but your gaming experience with older gear is still quite good. You're not really missing out on the most popular gaming venues with an old system.
Also, it's often not a matter of not being able to afford the card, but a matter of interest. If the low-end integrated video can play the more popular titles, it's possible that the player might develop an interest in gaming that he didn't have when he bought the machine (reason no. 1 to ALWAYS make sure you have proper expansion slots!)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
is a nForce (or better yet, nForce2) in a micro-ITX form factor. Is that too much to ask? I have this dream of a computer I can carry with my laptop, plug in to power and firewire networking when I need it, and use as a remote kernel for mathematica, when it begins to bog down... which means I need an absurdly small motherboard that can take modern processors.
I've had this sig for three days.
I have a severely overclocked GeForce 3 Ti200 and am getting ready to upgrade. Why? Becuase Unreal Tournament 2003 has unacceptable frame rates above 800x600 -- especially with things like trilinear filtering, hi-res textures, etc. enabled. What possible good would an even older generation of 3D video integrated on to a motherboard be?
I have two other systems with integrated video. One is a Dell server and the other is a homebuilt server (at $239 after rebate, I couldn't pass up the Dell). For servers, integrated video is fine. The only other value to integrated video is for general office use PCs where gaming performance is (should?) not be an issue.
Even if someone were to decide that the 3D performance with an integrated video was acceptable, where is the upgrade path when a new game they want won't run at an acceptable speed? Throw out the whole motherboard and get a new one? What was a simple upgrade now turns into a major pain, possibly with an entire OS reinstall (Windows becomes even more unstable after you swap the hardware out from under it and it attempts to re-detect).
So why put a 3D accelerator on the motherboard? So that marketing dweebs can advertise a cheap PC to consumers by touting the "advanced 3D graphics accelerator for the ultimate gaming experience!" Stupid people will buy them and companies will make money. It's as simple as that.
You gotta pay to play period, I don't think it has anything to do with being an elitist. If you want to be a gamer and not have to upgrade your video card you'll be relegated to playing older games at 640x480. If you want to blame someone blame the game designers who create the games which require ever increasing graphics and cpu horsepower. And to be honest with you I actually don't even think its fair to blame them. The game designers are just trying to produce the best looking games possible. They are literally just using the technology that is available to them. You can't expect them to give up on all graphical progress just so people with Geforce 1's can continue to play every game at 1024x768.
I can also completlely relate to how much it sucks to have to upgrade your hardware so often. But like I said that's the price you pay for being a gamer. This is NOT a cheap hobby. I don't know where people got the idea that gaming is a cheap hobby. I assume its a relic from the mid 1990's when the pre hardware accelerated games didn't require the latest and great videocard, but those days are long gone. These days it's a 24 month cycle for older games and a 12-16 month cycle for the latest FPS's. Of course like I said you can turn all the options down, but who wants to play games at 800x600 on a 19" monitor?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
that companies are promoting integrated video. Unwitting computer novices won't be able to upgrade easily. This will only confirm their misguided belief that computers are too complex, technical and expensive to make it worth their while.
I know because ten years ago I felt that way myself, even though I was reasonably techno-savvy (writing my own autoexec.bat files, etc.). I swore never to open a computer! Nowadays I blithely swap parts in and out, thanks to good advice and a good, generic machine that was easily upgraded.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Usually I'd tend to agree with this, anything onboard tends to leech its resources, taking up RAM or CPU when a seperate card might have handled this on its own. At least most newer board (not all) have the option of disabling the onboard devices from the bios so that you can install others without conflicts.
For power computer users, most onboard sucks. For an office-type PC, it's nice if you have your NIC, Video, and Sound all on the mainboard. This tends to make configuring the thing a little easier (with the exemption of some board which don't duely identify the onboard chips causing driver nightmares when installing a newer OS).
Onboard sound is a lot less messy than video though, also depending on the chipset. My board came with a SB PCI128 clone. Nothing super by most standards, and yet performance-wise I notice very little difference between it and peripheral soundcards. The "surround" feature is ok, it lets me use the line-in as a line-out for a 4 speaker effect, which works in a lot of games supporting 4 speaker directsound-surround.
I'm looking to build a new system now. I'll probably piece it together over a month or to, so built-in is nice in this case. After paying for the motherboard+cpu+HD+drive+case+CD-ROM (have a GeForce4 for it already, thank goodness), I think that I can allow for a cheap onboard soundcard and/or NIC. As long as I can disable them through the BIOS, then I won't have to start without sound, but I can always pop in a decent soundcard later.
On a related note, does anyone know which SoundCards are decent but not hugely expensive for somebody who is very into gaming, etc but not really sound development (although an input I could jack my guitar into would be way cool).
When can I get a dual-AGP board? - phorm
If you're setting up, say, a server, why on earth would you pay a penny more on graphics than you have to for basic diagnostics and BIOS access?
May we never see th
a board that will let you use integrated graphics and the agp slot at the same time. It would be great for a dual monitor setup, reducing both the number of cards in your pc and probably cost as well.
Will it run the top of the line games at an acceptable level in 2 years?
Top of the line in 3D graphic detail, or top of the line in fun? I choose the latter, which is why I play games on my GBA and my GBA emulator. You don't need 3D accelerated video for that, just a fast (866 MHz PIII) processor and some bandwidth from the processor to the video card (TNT2). Take it up a bit (recent Athlon and GeForce 2) and you can emulate many N64 games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Come on, im running UT2003 @1024 and max detail with my old Duron750 + Geforce2 MX 32MB
Then what you consider an acceptable minimum frame rate is different than what I do, that's all. Nothing wrong with that and I say be glad that you are satisfied. For the record, I'm using an Athlon XP1700+, plenty of RAM, and a Western Digital 120GB/7200rpm/8MB-cache hard drive. I am dissatisified with the frame rate when there is a lot of on-screen action with multiple bots in a fire fight.
That's the link the actual site gave as a mirror -- go figure :-)
Look before you link. Make sure it's the right story and not goatse.cx. However, in some cases, even that isn't possible.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can speak from personal experience on this one here. This mobo isn't for your hardcore gamer, its for your average computer user who still wants to play video games at a reasonable price.
You're right. The hardcore gamer these days doesn't mess with PC video cards, but owns a PS2, Xbox, and/or Game Cube. If you don't, then you're missing out on lots and lots of really great games. Compare the number of incredible console games released in the last two years with the number of PC games that actually make good use out of high-end video card features like vertex and pixel shaders. It's almost as if the PC 3D card market exists entirely to support first person shooters.
Before modding me down, realize I'm a game developer. I love the hardware in cards like the GeForce 4. But I see those cards are being great for development platforms, not for commercial software. Heck, half of the machines that Dell sells ship with the Intel integrated 3D chipset, and we're talking 2+ GHz machines. The 3D game market on the PC, to a great, great extent, has become an marginally profitable niche.
Integrated graphics chips reduce the up front cost of a PC, but they steal memory bandwidth from non-graphics tasks, as opposed to graphics cards which contain their own memory bus to minimize AGP use, so dedicated graphics cards may actually improve non-graphic performance. That's how MacOS 10.2 works, so I've read.
"Their is no way integrated video will EVER be viable for the gamer"
Can I remind you of this in a week or two when the nForce2 - based systems start coming out, then?
You know, the ones with a kick-ass embedded GeForce 4MX, which wipes the floor with my GeForce 2...
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
That reminds me of a call I took when I was working the phones for Origin Systems.
This dude calls me up because he can't get Privateer to work on his computer, which he called "The Switcher". Now, Privateer was a DOS game, and a pretty well-behaved one at that. If you had DOS drivers for your sound card, you were pretty much OK, so I figured this would be no problem. However, this swiftly turned into a nightmare call, as the guy on the other end of the line told me about the MONSTROSITY he had sitting under his desk.
He had three motherboards in the box. OK, fine, says I...he's built three computers into a custom case. Which one are we using, Chief? Well, he wants to use them all. Simultaneously. He says that he's got Windows set up to have the 286 processor on one mobo run the "low level" instructions, and the AMD386 run the "high level" instructions. He wants me to help him make Privateer do the same thing.
Uh, right. You implemented asymmetrical multiprocessing across two processor families, two motherboards, under WINDOWS 3.1? Right. If you can do THAT, you can figure out how to work the damn game yourself. Dude, get off my phone. You're wasting my time.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
No, that is completely wrong. With consoles now, you have bland games with boring graphics so that the game can be pushed to as many consoles as possible.
Most major console titles of recent years have all been for a single platform:
Halo (Xbox)
Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2)
Mario Sunshine (GC)
Final Fantasy X (PS2)
GTA 3 (PS2, later ported to PC)
Devil May Cry (PS2)
Super Monkey Ball (GC)
Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
Zelda (GC, not released yet)
Jet Grind Radio (Dreamcast)
Need I go on?
Integrated video solutions as a general class are not very good for running the newest games. Why do reviewers insist on focusing on 3d benchmarks? I read a bunch of reviews for the various ATI All-In-Wonder cards and most of them copy and paste the marketing boilerplate for unique video capture features, and then focus on game benchmarks. Who the hell is going to buy an All-In-Wonder just to play games?
An AIW costs at least $100 more than the equivalent Radeon card without the video features. It doesn't make sense to buy this card unless you are going to record video, and I finally found a couple of reviews written by people who realized this fact.
I don't think anyone is going to use integrated video primarily to play games. And I doubt any of these chipsets can't handle email and browser usage at low resolutions. So why can't someone test the things that might matter? Things like typical workstation resolutions (1280x1024, 1600x1200), video, and the TV out if there is one? These are all glaring questions for the tested chipsets.
I appreciate free hardware reviews but sometimes I wish the typical review sites weren't so focused on one aspect of computing and spent a little time trying to figure out who their audience is.
Most of the great titles for each console are exclusive, as another post here points out.
:) paid $50 for several premium NES titles. You can buy a GameCube for less than this, and most premium game titles are still $50, and have been for several years. $50 / up to 50 hours of gameplay = a pretty good deal in entertainment.
I paid $200 for my Genesis and I (or, rather, my parents
Your next point is unclear, but I suspect that poor people can more easily afford a cutting edge $200 console than a super crappy $500 computer.
Every computer game maker cares what Dell ships because that is the hardware platform for a whole lot of potential computer gamers.
There are many costs associated with console game development, and this is partly offset by the fact that current consoles have millions of deployed units which means a really popular game can easily sell millions of units. While it is possible to make a computer game cheaply it seems like most new PC games are published by huge corporations and end up costing millions.
You forgot to mention the three things that make computer gaming worthwhile: the keyboard, mouse and high resolution monitor.
Most of the best PC games rely on the flexibility of the mouse and keyboard as game controllers. First person shooters and real time strategy games just don't feel right without these controllers.
The high resolution monitor yields sharper images and makes small text readable. This is why you don't see too many successful real time strategy games or flight simulators on consoles.
Geez, how can you survive, your minimum frame rate MUST drop bellow 100 f/s on that setup! Hell, it might even get bellow the 85Hz refresh rate of the monitor, or if you're really unlucky, bellow the 60 f/s which is the maximum the human eye can perceive!
Mine drops way below 30fps with the GeForce 3 Ti200 when there is a lot of action on the screen (e.g. 3 bots in a close-in firefight). I suggest you try a copy of UT2003 before you make rash assumptions about the frame rates. It's *WAY* more graphics intensive than was its predecessor.