On paper, the G45 Express certainly looks like it should be able to run with the new IGP order. Front-side bus that hooks into the spoils of Intel’s Core 2 processor lineup? Bonus!.Proven south bridge with all the feature boxes, er, checked? Check.Second-generation PCI Express slot for discrete graphics upgrades? Check.Full Blu-ray decode acceleration? Check.DirectX 10-class unified shader architecture? Check.What does Intel’s latest G45 Express integrated graphics platform bring to the table? And the chipsets as a whole have become quite energy-efficient, too, capturing the attention of enthusiasts looking to build silent PCs for their living rooms.ĪMD and Nvidia have moved the goal posts forward by quite a leap with their latest integrated graphics chipsets, but what about Intel? The chip giant is the overwhelming integrated graphics sales leader, commanding the lion’s share of the overall graphics market on the strength of its IGP business alone. These graphic cores have also been bestowed with dedicated video processing engines that serve up silky Blu-ray playback with even an Econobox sub-$100 CPU. AMD and Nvidia are using functional blocks ripped from their high-end GPU architectures, assuring not only broad compatibility with games, but surprisingly adequate performance. Lately, however, integrated graphics chipsets have enjoyed a renaissance. Older integrated graphics solutions simply didn’t have the graphics horsepower to run gamesnot just at acceptable frame rates, but at alland they didn’t offer much in the way of video playback acceleration. At best, we only considered the IGPs of yesteryear as platforms for the next PC we’d build our mothers or corporate desktops we’d deploy to the masses of slack-jawed users in our domains. There was a time when enthusiasts had little interest in integrated graphics chipsets.
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