Starting with the IGP comparison, we find that AMD does indeed continue to place ahead of Intel in overall performance. Somewhat interesting to note, however, is that Intel does manage to run a couple of games faster. Supreme Commander is extremely CPU intensive, which may help to explain that particular result, but most of the remaining games should be pretty much GPU bottlenecked. Battlefield 2 was at one point completely unable to run on the GMA X3100, as were many of the other games. Over the past several months, Intel has continued to improve the drivers and we're now at the point where nearly all of the games ran without issue. Battlefield 2 at medium quality still had some graphical artifacts, so that result should be disqualified, but performance at medium quality is too slow regardless.
Given the improvements we've seen with updated drivers, we would actually go so far as to say that Intel could probably be equal to or slightly faster than the X1250 with the GMA X3100 if they could only optimize their drivers further. That may be surprising to hear, but in reality the Intel GPU has as many pipelines as the Radeon X1250, and current results in Battlefield 2, 3DMark, and a few other titles indicate that there's still untapped potential. Performance under Windows XP tends to be even better, as those drivers are more fully developed. (We will include results from a laptop running Windows XP using the GMA X3100 in a forthcoming article.) As it stands, however, AMD still has about a 20% performance advantage in the IGP sector. That really isn't much, especially considering the relatively low frame rates we're already talking about.
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