Feature Articles

AMD 690G IGP First Looks and Performance

By Zachary Chan - 28 Feb 2007

Performance Benchmarks

Performance Benchmarks

Under synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark05, the AMD690GM-M2 actually managed to show a rather big improvement in performance over the older Radeon Xpress 1100 and GeForce 6150 by about 30 - 40%. These are very impressive numbers considering that we've using readily available drivers (Catalyst 7.2) and not some optimized unofficial versions. The results that we managed to get actually follows AMD's claims of around 1000-1200 3DMarks at a 1024x768 resolution.

Moving on to actual game play however, the results are starkly different. In most cases, the AMD690GM-M2 performs little or in some cases even worse than the Radeon Xpress 1100 (and even the GeForce 6150 in C&C Generals). For UT2004, all three IGPs are on par at the resolution of 800x600, though the ATI boards pull away from the GeForce 6150 at higher resolutions. However, both the AMD 690G and Radeon Xpress 1100 are again deadlocked in performance within 1fps of each other, an insignificant number when all things are considered.

The AMD 690G doesn't change where IGP gaming stands and at best, it will still only be usable for moderate and simple gaming. UT2004 seemed to scale pretty well, but was not even able to push past 20fps at 800x600 in an old game like C&C Generals (at high quality settings). Of course, the upgrade in graphics capabilities means that you will get to enjoy Vista's fancy Aero interface, as well as the added AVIVO functionality.

*Update 01/03/2007 - For a more well rounded view, we've decided to include results from Quake 4 as well as it is a much more modern game, and one that is based on OpenGL. Note that for Quake 4 tests, the High Quality setting was used but all Advanced Graphics options were disabled - except for SMP.

Looking at the results here, the 690G is an improvement over the older Radeon Xpress 1100. However, the small improvements we see here are well below our expectations of the new chipset. The 690G posted the same average results for both 800x600 and 1024x768, but at 11fps, the board isn't really cut out for gaming. Again, there is no real advantage of using a larger frame buffer and locking yourself out of valuable system memory.

The interesting comparison here is that the GeForce 6150 actually posted viable results at 800x600 with 25fps and managed 17fps at 1024x768. Not only was its performance higher than the new 690G IGP, we noticed a stark difference in visual quality as well with both the Radeon Xpress 1100 and the new AMD 690G having poor rendering quality. Whether this is due to the IGP core or driver optimizations is up to speculation at this early stage, but note that we were using retail ForceWare and Catalyst drivers all along.

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