It’s a fixed-function T&L chip with two rendering pipelines and no pixel or vertex shader support.

That makes the Nforce2’s integrated graphics more of a DirectX 7 class GPU than the GeForce4 Ti series, which features DirectX 8 programmable shader technology.

The nForce2 motherboard incorporates a GeForce4 MX core, which is more closely related to the GeForce2 graphics processor series. There’s a world of difference between the three integrated graphics chipsets we’re looking at.

For now, we’ll focus on integrated 3D graphics. A detailed breakdown of this Shuttle XPC will be coming soon, when we do a full review and performance evaluation. This new SFF PC supports Pentium 4 processors with 400, 533, or 800MHz bus speeds, dual channel DDR memory, and, most importantly, its based on ATI’s new RS300 north bridge (aka Radeon 9100 IGP) and IXP 150 south bridge chipset. ATI’s new Radeon 9100 IGP chipset comes to us courtesy of Shuttle’s new XPC ST6IG4. Our nForce2 and Intel 865G systems were AOpen XC Cubes, which we reviewed a few months ago. After all, SFF PCs are one area where integrated graphics are most likely to be of use, as people start to build inexpensive Home Theater PCs and do-it-yourself PVRs or buy them as secondary PCs for home use. To test these three chipsets, we used recently-released small form factor (SFF) PCs. We wanted to see how the competitors compare and find out which (if any) delivers the speed and features necessary to be considered a legitimate 3D graphics solution. Or are they? Certainly nVidia’s nForce and nForce2 chipsets made strides in integrated graphics, and now ATI’s new Radeon 9100 IGP chipset raises the bar even higher.Īs the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core in the 865G chipset proliferates throughout the market, an integrated graphics race has begun. Graphics that are integrated into the motherboard chipset are just too slow and often lack the feature set required for modern 3D-accelerated games and applications. Here at ExtremeTech, we’ve been outspoken proponents of discrete video cards.

Intel extreme graphics 2 3d drivers