Intel GMA950 Integrated Graphics Core

	GMA900 (915G)	GMA950 (945G)
Core frequency	333MHz	400MHz
Pixel rate	1.3 gigapixels per second	1.6 gigapixels per second
Memory bandwidth	8.5GB/sec	10.9GB/sec
Pixel shader support	Up to 2.0	Up to 2.0

The rendering engine supports all the texture modes you'd expect from a modern 3D engine, including cube map support, various texture blending modes, and S3TC texture compression. New this time around is support for anisotropic filtering. Note that vertex shaders are handled by the host processor, so the faster the CPU, the faster the vertex processing.

The new core logic's support for DDR2/667 should mean more available free bandwidth for the graphics processor. Still, integrated graphics is a balancing act between memory fetches for graphics and memory accesses for the CPU. How that arbitration is handled is the key to balanced performance.

Another interesting feature of the new GMCH is the add-on digital video output card. Dubbed "ADD2+", the card can use 4 or 8 lanes of x16 PCI Express and support up to two displays in multimonitor mode. Alternatively, it can work together to support one very high resolution display. The GMCH can also output S-Video. In addition to the 3D capabilities of the integrated core, Intel has built in a video engine with full hardware motion compensation, MPEG2 hardware decode, subpicture support (e.g., for closed captions), and dynamic de-interlacing. Continued...