FIRST LOOK: NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Performance

Our Take

Our first benchmarking tests indicate that buyers have some reason to be excited about NVIDIA's new 6100 Integrated Graphics chipset family. Despite the fact that serious gamers would find any integrated graphics board far too limiting, the great majority of boards that are used in systems are integrated graphics boards. In our head-to-head competition with the ATI RS480, the current integrated performance king, the bottom-of - the-line 6100 outperformed the ATI in almost every benchmark. That certainly means that the 6150, clocked at 475MHz instead of the 6100's 425, should perform even better.

There are always some exceptions. Not surprisingly, ATI integrated graphics is still best in games optimized for ATI, like Half Life 2. However, the 6100 is close enough to the ATI that the 6150 may even obliterate that advantage. Far Cry, optimized for NVIDIA, performs significantly better on NVIDIA 6100 than ATI RS480. NVIDIA performs best in every other game that we tested, and it was the top performer in both 3D benchmarks and the General Performance PCMark2005.

It should also be pointed out that NVIDIA is just introducing AMD integrated graphics, while ATI has integrated graphics solutions for both AMD and Intel platforms. The great majority of integrated graphics boards are now based on the poorer-performing Intel platform, so that fact alone will keep ATI's market share of integrated graphics high for the time being.

While we are excited about the improved integrated graphics performance within the NVIDIA 6100 family, this is not to say integrated graphics have completely arrived. Who would really want to play Doom 3 at 24FPS at 800x600 - and that's with no eye candy. However, by lowering detail and resolution, you should be able to find a playable 640x480 or 800x600 in most games. However, if you want better detail or higher resolution, you need to use a better video card. There is even good news here as NVIDIA mirrors ATI in now giving the user the option to run integrated graphics and a PCIe video card at the same time.

The Biostar TForce 6100-939 may not use the top-line 6150/430 combo, but it does extremely well with the 6100/410. The overclocking and memory tweaking options were surprisingly good. The Biostar has enough flexibility to satisfy many users, and it even has the voltage adjustment options that seem to be the last thing to appear on value boards. The TForce 6100 was fast, stable, trouble-free in our brief testing, and extremely flexible - particularly for a micro ATX integrated graphics motherboard. This Biostar would make a great foundation for a cheap system with decent performance, though it is missing the desired options that would make it a good multimedia box.

All-in-all, the NVIDIA 6100 is a decent integrated graphics solution and the new performance leader in AMD integrated graphics. It would have been even better if NVIDIA had made it 4 pixel pipelines instead of two, but the performance and options at the higher end does make the NVIDIA first choice among AMD integrated graphics solutions - at least until the next round from ATI.