Benchmarks III
On to gaming and starting off with 3DMark 2001SE. I'll be including the scores from on-board i830 graphics as a matter of course. Anyway, run at the default resolution of 1024x768x32. Drivers have been set to quality for all the gaming benchmarks.
The perils of most on-board graphics becomes abundantly clear when we stress it with a modern benchmark. On the upside, the performance of the SB51G when coupled with the all-powerful Radeon 9700 Pro is nothing short of excellent. We're hitting almost 15,000 marks without tinkering with either card or CPU. If you think this little box of tricks is a compromise, it's time to think again.
On to Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Benchmarked using normal settings and the system-taxing Valley of the Jaguar Timedemo in the publicly available demo.
This is one benchmark where PC1066 RAMBUS shines. Having said that, neither DDR-based platform (when running a R9700 Pro) is poor. The on-board graphics make this benchmark look more akin to a slideshow.
Comanche 4 is another benchmark that stretches the subsystem to the limit. Large expanses and masses of geometry make it relatively sensitive to subsystem changes. The on-board i830 graphics couldn't execute this benchmark due to it not supporting Texture and Lighting. The SiS648-powered chipset fails to do as well as expected here.
