Assuming that one would want to play some newer 3D games on a new system, would the integrated graphics of some Intel boards be sufficient, or no?
Even if it’s adequate now, likely someday you’ll want to upgrade. And although it’s supposed to be easy to disable the on-board graphics of a motherboard and add a new card, I know of at least two people who had such trouble they vowed never to get on-board graphics again.
I’d stay away from it.
Short answer: Nope.
Integrated graphics are generally considered by gamers to be barely adequate to boot the PC and show the desktop. Of course, the rabid gamers are the ones buying the $500+ video cards that are obsolete (to them, at least!) in 3 months.
I’m not that crazy, but I did have to upgrade my video to an “upper-mid-level” version recently just to avoid some really odd blank spots on screen - the mid-level card I bought last July just couldn’t pump out the pixels fast enough. 
Newer games are being written with the assumption that the player has the newer hardware.
If you want to play some of the newer 3-d games, onboard graphics is a no-no. Definately get a seperate graphics card. ATI and Nvidia are the top two major brands to look at and both offer great performance. Personally though, I’d take an ATI.
I have a motherboard with an integrated graphics card and it’s given me a lot of fits. Any 3-D game with “fogging” produced a 3-D model with a completely gray texture. All of these things that were supposed to be fancy 3-D objects ended up being gray blobs. Updated drivers finally did solve the problem, but it took a while for them to come out. I’ve also got one game that just exits whenever I try to run it on this machine. I poured through the log files that the game creates, and it looks like it can’t find a video mode that it can use.
Stick with a popular graphics card. It can be cheap, but it better be popular and it better be a seperate card.
Here are some benchmarks.
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040211/index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040211/radeon_9100-11.html#unreal_tournament_2003
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040211/radeon_9100-12.html
In short, integrated video chips are not good for the more recent 3d games.
Spending $60CDN to get an Nvidia Geforce 4MX 440 is better than integrated video.
The best bet is to save up and go for a nice mid range card like ATI 9600 Nonpro for $130CDN.
or even the Geforce 4 ti4200 128MB for $95CDN…
Onboard graphics chips will always have more limited 3D capabilities compared to even middling graphics cards of the same vintage. Graphics cards need a lot of circuitry, and even heatsinks and fans on the top end ones lately, to generate all those bitty polygons and high resolution textures and dynamic lighting and fog effects and long draw distances etc. There isn’t enough room on the motherboard for all that stuff, so onboard graphics will be more limited.
nVidia GeForce FX 5950 (it’s the one on top) Notice that it takes up two slots on your computer.
If you mean the “Intel Extreme Graphics” integrated chips, they are completely unsuitable for any recent game. I doubt you could get any modern game to even run on one of them, much less run fast enough to be playable.
Even the fastest integrated chipsets available, the Geforce4MX one found some of nVidia’s nForce2 boards, and ATI’s 9100’s IGP, are VERY slow at more recent games, much slower than discrete cards using the same chips; seeing Battlefield 1942 played on a Geforce4MX IGP, was almost painful.
If you are getting a new machine, definatly go with a seperate card; even a
Radeon 9200 or GeforceFX 5200 for ~$65 will give you vastly better performance. But for optimal game playing, you need at least a mid-range card - you can get a Radeon 9600 PRO for $112.
Thanks for all the replies…does all of this apply also to AMD’s “3D NOW!” chips? Either way, I’ll be sure to get an ATI or NVIDIA card.
The “3D Now!” on AMD’s chips refer to processor extensions that are built-into their processors, not a separate graphics chip. This is similar to Intel’s MMX or SSE/SSE2 extensions.(Note, modern AMD chips have MMX, SSE, and in the case of the Athlon64, SSE2 extensions.) These extensions speed up certain task, but for gaming you still need a graphics card. The integrated graphics chips you can get for a Athlon motherboard will have similar performance to those on Intel boards.
If you are looking at getting a new system for gaming, I really reccomend an Athlon 64; they have clear edge over Pentium 4s in gaming.
I buy a lot of machines with onboard LAN, sound and video, but these are business machines and the biggest graphical workout they are likely to get is when the user decides to enable the 3d text screensaver.
For a personal machine on which intensive graphical games will be played, there’s not much point getting a mainboard with onboard graphics UNLESS you’re running XP Pro and you intend to install a second (better) graphics card in order to use dual monitors (but still only the better one for gaming).
I probably won’t run a second monitor, but you also brought up the onboard LAN and sound…are those better solutions than the onboard video seems to be? I’m seeing a lot of the motherboards out there featuring onboard LAN and 5.1 sound along with USB 2.0 and Firewire…
Onboard Ethernet adapters are just like the expansion cards you can get. Sound is pretty good, but usually not as top of the line as the separate products. There is also specialized sound mixing and editing hardware that only comes separately.
Make sure your board has an AGP slot , otherwise you might be looking for one thats PCI. My mobo has onboard video , but no agp slot
Declan
I’ve only ever had a problem with onboard LAN once and that was years ago (and I suspect a driver update would have sorted it). As sturmhauke says, onboard sound and LAN tends to be exactly the same as the basic PCI cards you might buy to do the same job (Typically Realtek AC97 for sound and RT81XX for LAN); the motherboard even treats them as ordinary PCI devices - the advantage being that they don’t seem to add any cost to the overall setup and they don’t occupy a PCI slot.