In what could be an “one up” and almost a sucker punch to Intel, AMD announced an amazing new chipset, the 780G which is sure to create some flutter in the industry. The 780G puts a full fledged GPU on to the main-board and while I was reading the specs, it does seem to be substantially better than any of the other on-board or, ( in correct terminology,) integrated graphics chips out there. While Intel claims to have “more half of the graphics” market, the graphics or should I say “craphics” cards supported by Intel (, and to some extent AMD earlier) are nothing more than a big joke. The only reason they have such a huge portion of the market is because the average joe/jane is stuck with it and because it came pre-installed. I was recently quizzed by an acquaintance as to why his system could not run Bioshock and the only answer I could give him really was, “Well your system isn’t designed for that sort of gaming”. To that his reply was “Oh I just got a brand new system. How is it that it can’t run a latest game?”

It’s really disturbing for people who buy a brand new PC only to see it fail, utterly miserably I might add, to even push a last generation game at a shallow 24 FPS. Most are clueless, and while their PCs may be brand new with a “fast” multi-core processor with gazillions of RAM at it’s disposal, it can only but run their Office applications. Yes they run faster and better! No such luck with games though. People have to realized, having a faster CPU or for that matter having more cores doesn’t really help too much with games. It does to some extent, but as it stands right now, I would rather have a top-line graphics card like the 8800 GTX than a quad core CPU. It’s a very deceptive concept, I know, but thats how it is.

Anyone who has worked on graphics knows how utterly lousy and how much of a pathetic abomination integrated graphics chips can be. I have battled with all sorts of problems, everything from broken drivers to faulty implementations to near absent feature support. I hope things are finally changing for the better. The question is where does that leave Intel? Intel has been desperately trying to get a better graphics solution on to it’s boards without too much luck. The chipset that AMD has thrown up beats anything that Intel can conjure up hands down! At least in the near future that is. While Intel may add on more cores, they aren’t going to be too useful for people who want to run the latest games. With quality of integrated graphics on offer by Intel, users will have to install, at the very least, a low end graphics card. Sorry Intel, that’s how bad things are!

Then what has the Green Brigade (NVIDIA) have to say to all this? AMD’s acquisition of ATI is finally showing it’s advantages. While the graphics chips may not be the fastest out there, they are indeed very attractive considering the price point. Chipzilla and Graphzilla better get their acts together because if 2007 was the year both ruled in their respective departments, there is a new kid in town. He’s got better and faster guns, and looking more attractive than any of the old boyz!