Leigh Stark22 October 2008, 10:15 AM
If the sound of "integrated graphics" make you shudder, NVIDIA has some good news for you.
The humble GPU has come a long way in the past decade. From its beginnings in the 2D & 3D solutions that required the use of two-boards up to the combination of processes and now to what graphics processing units can do, the simple GPU has certainly done a lot.
Most of us have seen a motherboard with integrated video in some form or another. They've existed for years and often come with the lowest of the low, graphics cores which at their best make are cringe-worthy. Designed to do the bare minimum, motherboards with GPU's barely hit above the low-end mark and rarely are good for anything more than showing the operating system and playing games that came out four years too late.
All of this might change however with the release of the new Nvidia 9300 motherboard GPU.
Based on the modern high-end Geforce 9 series of graphics processing units, the 9300M GPU runs 16 dedicated cores and includes programming language support for special GPU applications. Nvidia's PureVideo HD is also included for high-definition playback as well as the inclusion of PhysX technology for better game physics and even Nvidia's widely touted Hybrid SLI.
Depending on what you're doing and the hardware you have, Hybrid SLI works in one of two ways:
For HybridPower, the GPU will be throttled for performance giving you either less power and more battery life or the exact opposite. Depending on whether you're writing some papers or playing hardcore games, this could make all the difference to that extra time you're spending on the plane.
Hybrid SLI's other ability is GeForce Boost, a feature seen only with people who have both a Geforce motherboard GPU from the 9 series (like this article's 9300M GPU) and an extra Geforce 9 series video card plugged into the SLI slot. Geforce Boost allows both the motherboard graphic processor and the video card graphics processor to run together.
We're just now beginning to see boards with these chipset trickle out of factories with Asus being one of the first to offer them. Boards like their P5N7A-VM are among the first out to consumers and will make for a fantastic option for customers looking to build their new HTPC with decent on-board graphic options with room to move.
It gets better because people looking for cheap system with which to do Photoshop editing on or use tools from the Adobe Creative Suite 4 will now be able to tap into more power than they otherwise would have if they just had a cheap & crappy all-in-one motherboard. While we know that ATI cards work with CS4, we also know that Adobe and Nvidia have worked together to see that performance be a top priority for the two components.
Even with these new advancements, Nvidia might still have issues competing with AMD's ATI Crossfire chipset that currently dominates Intel's chipset scene. With Crossfire-X literally littering the playing field, the 9300 motherboard design might have to go a long way to making itself sit high among the ATI brethren. Against other companies like S3's chipsets however, it's going to be a no-contest slaughter.
Now all Nvidia have to do is get their stuff out there... and hope that that pesky defective chip casing problem really is sorted.