This article originally appeared on Hardware Central.

The integrated graphics market is a game of give and take, where features and performance butt heads with the desire to lower costs. Desktop chipsets such as Intel's 865G and Nvidia's nForce2 not only need to appeal to penny-pinching corporate IT managers, but ideally reach the home-PC and mainstream gaming markets as well. This balancing act usually results in a compromised core that doesn't really fit any particular market, and draws sneers and scorn from 3D game buffs. But Intel is looking to change that with the successor to today's 865G's Extreme Graphics 2.

Ask most PC enthusiasts to name the leaders of the graphics market, and they'll name Nvidia Corp. and ATI Technologies. Yet the 3D game rivals are only runners-up: Intel is the world's largest supplier of PC graphics, even though it doesn't offer a dedicated (card- rather than motherboard chipset-based) solution, and hasn't since the early days of 3D graphics and the ill-fated i740.

In fact, recent estimates assign Intel well over 30 percent of the overall market, while AMD and Nvidia sit back at around 25 percent apiece. Of course, many integrated solutions go unused or get upgraded to dedicated AGP graphics later on, but these are still impressive numbers, especially since both Nvidia and ATI offer both integrated and discrete products.

The current i865G supports both integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 and dedicated AGP graphics, along with all the dual-channel DDR, 800MHz front-side bus and Hyper-Threading options of the standard i865PE chipset; the value-minded i865GV simply deletes the AGP slot. The Extreme Graphics 2 core does offer cost-effective integrated video, but its 3D performance and feature list leave a lot to be desired, and even a base entry-level AGP product like Nvidia's GeForce4 MX can take it to town.

However, this year's crop of Intel chipsets is expected to upgrade the integrated video component quite significantly, both in terms of raw power and features support.

Grantsdale-G: DirectX 9 for the Masses

June's high-end "Alderwood" and mainstream "Grantsdale" chipsets, expected to be released as the 925 and 915 series respectively, will herald the arrival of many new technologies. These include the LGA775 processor socket, PCI Express instead of AGP graphics, support for DDR-2 memory -- and Intel's Extreme Graphics 3 core, which IT sites say may be formally dubbed Graphics Media Accelerator.

This will be introduced with the Grantsdale-G chipset, which will take the place of today's i865G, with value-oriented GV and GL versions to follow. Grantsdale-G will support both dedicated and discrete graphics, while value models like the GV will be limited to integrated graphics. In other words, Grantsdale will use the same strategy Intel employed with the mainstream 865 and Extreme Graphics 1 or 845 chipsets, offering variants for different markets and budgets.

Intel's new integrated video represents a major upgrade over its predecessor, with a quad-pipeline design and fill rate approximately four times that of the i865G. The raw performance difference promises to be astounding: while no threat to $300-and-up AGP or PCI Express cards, Grantsdale-G should provide raw, old-school performance on par with Nvidia's GeForce FX 5600 XT or ATI's Radeon 9600 SE.

Intel has also addressed the demand for DirectX 9.0 by supporting Microsoft's Pixel Shader 2.0 specification at the hardware level. Vertex shader duties will likely still be handled by software and the system CPU, but this is still a huge step up from the 865G. Other rumored features include dual-monitor support, hardware MPEG decoding, and a high-end RAMDAC.

Exactly how fast the Grantsdale-G will play 3D games, along with its range of high-end image-quality enhancements such as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, will be the real litmus test, but most games should be at least playable at moderate resolutions such as 1,024 by 768 or 1,280 by 1,024. Improvements are definitely relative where integrated graphics are concerned, and even 25 or 30 frames per second will feel fabulous compared to the 865G's slide show of high-end games like Unreal Tournament 2004.

The Impact of Unified Memory Architecture

These specifications are very impressive for motherboard graphics, but core performance is only part of the equation. All integrated solutions have one major challenge to contend with, relating to memory usage and bandwidth. A chipset like the 865G or Grantsdale-G borrows a chunk of system memory for the display buffer; this unified memory architecture not only reduces available RAM and slows the system overall, but also limits graphics bandwidth.

There is no possible way for an integrated solution to match the specifications of high-end dedicated graphics cards, some of which sport DDR speeds in excess of 1GHz with a 256-bit pipe. Even entry-level AGP cards may utilize 600MHz to 750MHz DDR speeds with a 128-bit bus, far in excess of even dual-channel DDR400 platform capacity. For example, a Grantsdale-G platform will likely have 3.2GB/sec of memory bandwidth for all system processes, while even the entry-level GeForce FX 5200U card has well over 10GB/sec of dedicated graphics bandwidth.

A potential solution would be to institute a distinct memory bus for integrated graphics, but such a design would likely send the price/performance balancing act from the high wire into the net. There have also been questions raised concerning the higher latencies of the new Intel chipsets' DDR-2 and its potential effect on integrated video, as well as issues surrounding the use of such an expensive type of memory for low-cost integrated systems. These will need to be answered upon release.

A Serious Step Forward