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

Halo

Halo: Combat Evolved was announced over 3 years ago by Bungie (makers of the Myth series of games). A first person shooter (fps) that was first released on the Xbox, two years ago, many feel this game is too little too late. In my opinion, however, this game is an excellent test of modern graphics cards' capabilities, including support for Pixel Shader 2.0 and several features in DirectX 9 that didn't exist 2 years ago in hardware.

Playing Halo on the RADEON 9100 IGP is a mixed bag. Today's most powerful cards such as the RADEON 9800 XT or GEFORFCE FX 5950 are required to fully play Halo with maximum resolution and settings. On the RADEON 9100 IGP, I needed to set the resolution to 800x600 to play the game. Truthfully this is pretty amazing, as Intel's i865 Extreme Graphics 2 doesn't even play the game at all.

Interestingly enough, even,800x600 sometimes feels a bit sluggish. However, the game is mostly playable at this resolution with the integrated graphics of the RADEON 9100 IGP, except when multiple enemies and explosions occur at the same time. The fidelity of the graphics from the Xbox version are fully present on the RADEON 9100 IGP, with reflections on the visor, and many of the particle effects present as found on the Pixel Shader 2.0 setting.

Homeworld 2

Homeworld was released by Sierra Games a few years back (in 1999). At the time it was hailed as a fun, thorough space RTS (Real Time Strategy) that set the standard for graphics in the genre. Personally I found the game hard to play (the control interface was more than a bit clunky and the learning curve for the game was intense.)

Earlier this year, Sierra released Homeworld 2. This game improved upon the graphics, game play, controls of the original, and is fairly popular among gamers today. From my point of view, however, I want to know how the integrated graphics of the RADEON 9100 IGP performs in the game.

Playing the game with a resolution of 1024x768 was, mostly playable when in the building stages of the fleet. When fighting an huge enemy fleet, however, the game slows down. That this game is playable on a integrated graphics chip set at all is pretty amazing. Playing at 800X600, is mostly playable throughout. By comparison Intel's Extreme Graphics 2 barely runs this game acceptably at 640x480.

Morrowind

The RADEON 9100 IGP was designed to play games like Morrowind. Morrowind is a RPG that Bethesheda Softworks developed 2 years ago for the Xbox. Last year, the game was released to the PC with better graphics and higher resolution capability. The graphics in the game are simply breathtaking with the RADEON 9100 IGP. The water looks crystal clear, due to the use of pixel shaders.

Performance in the game on my test bed was fine on the 9100 IGP. No, I couldn't play 1280x960 4x AA and 16x AF like on my 9800 Pro, but 800x600 with pixel shaders turned on was fully playable. The difference between looking at Morrowind on the 9100 IGP and it on the Extreme Graphics 2 of the Intel board is like night and day. The water looks murky, dark and formless on the EG2 or Geforce4 MX 440, but looks almost real on the 9100 IGP.