AMD's 690 chipset put through its paces
AMD has some high hopes for its 690 chipset, the first to bring those in-house ATI graphics to bear on an integrated setup, and supposedly destined to leapfrog Intel in the budget space. After some substantial delays, they've finally got it out the door, and now bit-tech.net has put the chipset through its paces. Perks like HDMI 1.3 with HDCP, integrated TV encoder and dual discrete displays make the chipset plenty lovable off the bat, but unfortunately the graphics aren't going to blow anyone away. The folks at bit-tech found a few high-end games playable at a paltry 640 x 480 resolution -- games that wouldn't even run on the minimal integrated graphics from Intel -- but it's clear that if you want a truly modern gaming experience, you're still going to need to spring for a PCI-Express card. General performance was pretty comparable to Intel offerings, but what has bit-tech especially excited is the prospect of this sort of integrated tech making into ultraportable laptops, and the Intel processor-based chipsets that AMD is promising as well.
