Ummm. the Intel 900 i think. The X300 has been out for a while now where the Intel 900 haven't been out for all too long. I'll double check this for you.
The x300 is definately the way to go here, I mean intel's integrated graphics were always really lousey for anything beyond WarCraft 3 and although the 900 promises twice the performance of the Intel Extreme 2's it's still pretty junky. Yes the 900 is a DirectX9 solution, but not a great one,it uses "tile based rendering" and lacks any hardware T&L or vertex shader - so other than the essintial Pixel shader 2.0 for DX9, it's a pretty basic accelerator. From the final page of that review (on andantech)... The X300 is no beast, but its speed can often be measured in multiples of Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 performance. While some games are actually playable, and performance is head and shoulders above that of Intel Extreme Graphics 2, performance is too abysmal for us to recommend the GMA900 for anything beyond 2D computing and pretty rudimentary 3D.
Alright. That suprised me a bit. The new on-board graphics 950 from Intel has a 425mhz core and supports directx 9c, but I read that article you were talking about from andantech or whatever.
Can anyone tell me if this card would work to play Counterstrike? My brother is looking to buy a computer with this chip and would like to know.
While neither is that impressive, CS, including CS: Source, is pretty lightweight compared with the likes of Doom 3 and FEAR. The X300 might be a better option simply because it typically is paired with it's own RAM, whereas the GMA900 is integrated into the chipset and takes part of the system RAM for its graphics memory.
Yeah but if he has 1 gb of ram it shouldn't hurt it too much right? I only ask because it's the only game he ever plays lol.
Since it's running the Source engine the X300 will actually be pretty good, as ATI card, even the lowend ones can run thing at a surprising good clip on higher settings provided the rest of the system is alright.
