14 DAY TRIAL // Intel recently launched the Clarkdale and Arrandale central processing units with integrated graphics, but most focus has been so far on their actual processing power than on their graphics capabilities. This can be seen as rather surprising, considering the fact that these integrated graphics were supposed to be one of the key elements that would differentiate the new processors from the competition. More recently, however, even though somewhat late, the folks over at Bit-tech.net have finally completed their incursion into the 45nm GPU that comes as a part of the new chips.
While the CPU's graphics performance when gaming was, predictably, nothing to be shocked by, it seems that Intel was genuinely successful in making the integrated graphics circuits quite highly adept at handling video. According to the review, the Intel GMA HD actually “has an advanced feature set especially if you're interested in high quality video playback.”
Intel seems to have put special effort into optimizing the graphics solution for video, knowing that, as far as gaming and overall high-end graphics performance was concerned, it was not going to be on par with that of NVIDIA or AMD cards. The GMA HD is capable of bitstreaming, Blu-ray playback with picture-in-picture and HDMI 1.3a support. Also, in addition to the very smooth HD video playback, the chips also showed a power consumption only a couple of Watts higher than that of competing solutions.
The overall conclusion of the reviewers is that the new Clarkdale and Arrandale processors with integrated graphics achieve a balanced combination of raw performance, video features and efficiency. Nevertheless, the CPUs are definitely not very suited for gaming, especially playing the newer titles. In fact, gaming-wise, the graphics were found to only be capable of competing with hardware launched one to two years ago. As such, playful end-users will have to turn to AMD or NVIDIA to sate their appetite.