Motherboard: ATI RADEON 9100 IGP(MSI RS3M 7003) :: Introduction

ATI is a world leader in display device technology (read video cards). Existing as a company for the last 22 years, ATI is an old hat in the business that won't be going away anytime soon. Over the last 22 years, ATI has concentrated on building video cards and related technologies that aren't matched by any of their competitors at this time.

ATI entered into the motherboard chipset race last year for the first time with the release of IGP320M and IGP320. Unfortunately, due to ATI mostly concentrating on the mobile front with this chipset, we only saw a few examples of the IGP320 in the desktop arena. With graphics based upon RADEON 7000 technology, the IGP320 is hardly a good integrated chipset for the modern games of today. Enter the IGP9100 chip set that I'm reviewing today.

Modern integrated graphics chipsets, honestly suck. The major players in the Intel Pentium 4 arena with integrated graphics consist of Intel, with their Extreme Graphics 2, SIS, with their SIS 655FX, Via, with their Savage graphics chips are all based upon old, outdated technology. The Extreme Graphics 2, for instance is based upon DirectX 7 technology, however I'd never use the EG2 for anything but the oldest games.

The 9100 IGP comes with the premise that the chipset is not designed for the high end gamer, but for the OEM that wants to build a cheap (under $500) system with integrated graphics, sound, LAN USB 2.0, Firewire etc. After all, why buy a motherboard that costs $65 without integrated graphics when you can buy an 9100 IGP with DirectX 8.1 graphics? So let's see what this board has to offer.

The RADEON 9100 IGP is based upon ATI's RADEON 9100 chip. As such it supports features like DirectX 8.1 Pixel Shaders in hardware (up to version 1.4) (22 instructions in a pass, support found in games like Morrowind, Aquanox, and others), Vertex Shaders 1.1 (128 shader instructions in a single pass) and many of the other features of high end video cards from just 2 years ago began supporting (with the RADEON 8500 series of cards).

The 9100 IGP also supports features that improve the image quality of games. Aliasing is a problem in many games where the lines are thinner than a pixel causing a staircase or "jaggy" effect. The RADEON 9100 IGP supports SmoothVision anti-aliasing, with up to 6x super sample anti-aliasing. The other major feature is anisotropic filtering. This helps sharpen textures and can improve image quality immensely.

The card comes with 2 pixel pipelines, which is a step down from the 9100 desktop cards which come with 4 pixel pipelines. For an integrated chipset, however, where the memory has to be shared with the CPU and system, this is not a hindrance. In point of fact, I expect performance to be so much higher with the 9100 IGP than with the competing Intel integrated graphics that it won't even be funny.

The fill rate and memory bandwidth of the RADEON 9100 IGP are appropriate with the stated goals of this board. With 2 pixel rendering pipelines and a 300 MHz core speed, the 9100 IGP has a theoretical maximum fill rate of 600 Mega pixels a second. The memory speed is 200 MHz and with a 128-bit memory bus, this gives a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/second.