Integrated Graphics vs Budget ATI and Nvidia Video Cards

The add-in boards

These two cards represent the least expensive PCI-Express cards that you can still find on the retail market and as we will show you are a welcome upgrade from integrated video.

First off we have the Radeon X300 which is designed with a 4 pipe rendering architecture. It provides full support for Microsoft DirectX 9, as well as ATI?s SmartShader and SmoothVision technologies just like it’s big brother, the X1900XTX. All this adds up to give impressive processing power and superior 3D image quality to ensure that you are fully supported on today’s games titles and delivering a much better gaming experience. Our X300 as mentioned above has 4 pixel pipelines, 128MB of memory running at 400MHz and a GPU clocked at 325MHz. The X300 featured in our article is currently priced at around $45.

In the past getting the latest generation graphics hardware for gaming and multimedia applications has been out of reach for consumers in the value segment. The NVIDIA 6200 TurboCache re-writes that rule by delivering the latest in GPU features and performance at an affordable price. It supports DirectX 9, Shader Model 3.0, and NVIDIA PureVideo to give you impressive gaming and multimedia power. The NVIDIA card in our test is the 6200 Turbo Cache which also has 4 pixel pipelines, a GPU clocked at 300MHz, and 128MB of memory running at 550MHz. The 6200TC featured in our article is also currently priced at $45.

Now let’s take a look at their competition…