ATI Radeon Xpress 200: Performance, PCI Express & DX9 for Athlon 64

Integrated Graphics Performance: Conclusion

When the nForce2 was released, its integrated graphics could outperform the slowest GeForce4 MX 420, but not much more than that. With the move to full floating point DX9 architecture, die space, heat and transistor count are much more valid concerns, and it would seem that the days of just integrating a company's entry level GPU are over.

The Radeon Xpress 200 does one very important thing better than Intel's integrated graphics - compatibility. Since the underlying architecture is based off of the X300, game compatibility isn't much of an issue.

The performance of the Radeon Xpress 200 is better than the integrated graphics of Intel's 915G, but it's not the type of demolishing performance we would expect from a chipset produced by one of the top two GPU manufacturers. Then again, performance isn't what sells in this market, after all, despite how bad Intel's integrated graphics performs it still sells incredibly well. We would have liked to see better performance out of the Radeon Xpress 200, at least X300 SE levels but with only two rendering pipelines it's tough to do. We understand the tradeoff ATI had to make, we just wish it didn't have to be this way. We'd take the Radeon Xpress 200 over Intel's integrated solution any day, but we can always want more. Rumor has it that ATI's Intel chipset will feature an updated graphics core, so we may just get our wish sooner than expected.

SurroundView however does make up for things, enabling excellent multimonitor support for between 2 and 4 displays - something no other platform can currently promise. In our opinion, if you've got the monitors, SurroundView itself is worth the price premium of the Radeon Xpress 200 over the discrete-only 200P. For us, more desktop space is always a plus and with three monitors it's something that's quite attainable.