Introduction

While most of us on Tweak Town are after the most performance and overclocking capable boards out there, it's important to note that there is still a very large side of the market that we don't always give a great deal of thought to, that being the integrated market.

It may come as a surprise, but most office desktop PC's and many generic workstations are all based around integrated design where the motherboard uses an integrated GPU. In the past IGP based systems have been shunned like the plague; their use of system memory for the video cache has caused system slow downs. Not only this, but the limited bandwidth that the system memory offers isn't enough for any decent game play or video rendering. That is until AMD/ATi finally listened to the end users.

Yes, IGP's are meant to be low cost, but the fact was that the performance of an IGP based system was that bad, the IGP was disabled and a cheaper AGP or now PCIe based graphics card would be used in their place as they had their own frame buffer memory. AMD's 790GX was the first IGP to integrate a 128MB GDDR3 memory chip onto the board to act as the primary frame buffer. Yes, you can still allocate system memory to it as well to help bolster performance, but if you simply want to use the 128MB without having it suck system memory, you can now do that as well. The 785G also continues this tradition to include cache which AMD has called SidePort memory.

Today as a follow up to the 785G chipset review, we are taking a look at the 785G's graphics performance compared the 790GX's. Since the 785G is DX10.1 compatible, will it have any performance increase over the 790GX? - Let's have a bit of a look see.