ATI's Integrated Graphics

RS300 Graphics Configuration

RS300 is all about taking what a graphics company does best - produce good graphics parts - and combining that into a chipset. For the first time in the Integrated space ATI have moved the feature set of the Radeon 9200, including hardware Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shader capabilities up to PS1.4.

It has been widely speculated that RS300 did in fact integrate an entire Radeon 9200 class product, however ATI are still keen on hitting the low end price point, and utilising the entire RV250 chip, alongside the rest of the Northbridge functionality, would have inevitably pushed the chipset cost too high. Instead, where the RV280 is a 4x1 (Pixel pipelines x texture per pipe) the integrated video of R3200 is only a 2x1 configuration. However, the default speed, even with a passive cooler, is 300MHz giving a 600M pixel/texel per second fill-rate, and speeds of 350MHZor beyond are attainable.

With the RS300 chipset ATI are pushing the availability of fully shader capable hardware even lower into the market meaning that developers will have an even larger market if they wish to opt for fully shader capable games.

Integrated Performance

At present ATI do not have review samples available as they are still in a qualification stage, but for the launch they did have a few systems running that we were allowed to install what we liked and take some numbers from. We got a few 3DMark and UT2003 performance figures off ATI's test system, which utilised a Pentium4 3.06GHz with 512MB of DDR400 RAM, 128MB allocated to the Framebuffer.

Under 3DMark03, at the default settings, the Game Test 1 frame rate are quite good for an integrated chipset, but this is the easiest test really designed for DX7 performance. Game Test 2 and 3 show a low performance, but these are very much stress tests for all 3D graphics at present and bear in mind that no other integrated graphics are capable of running these at all yet.

Under the earlier 3DMark2001SE we see that both the low and high detail game tests are performing quite well and the Shader enabled GT4 falls a little below 30FPS. The Pixel Shader 1.4 'Advanced Shader' test also score 51.2 FPS.

UT2003 are also showing fairly impressive frame rates, with the performance being quite playable even at 1024x768.

Integrated Display

Being an ATI graphics based product, the display outputs integrated into the system are much the same as you would find in one of their discrete parts, with Dual Integrated RAMDAC's (although, only to 300MHz), Integrated Flat Panel support and integrated TV-Out. Along with ATI's DVD/MPEG decoding, they are suggesting that PC's equipped with an RS300 chipset are ideal suited towards being low cost systems for Window XP Media Center Edition - just add TV Wonder PCI board and you have a full PVR capable, low cost PC.

Normally with integrated chipsets the integrated video is disabled when another board is plugged into and AGP socket, however ATI have done something a little different with RS300. Should a discrete ATI board be placed in the AGP socket this can be run in conjunction with the integrated graphics to produce fully independent triple display output. HydraVision can be utilised for this extended display capability and if you were using a high performance graphics board, such as Radeon 9800 PRO, just target games at the display this board is running to ensure that full 3D performance is utilised, as opposed to the integrated 3D performance.