Page 1 of ATI® Radeon® Xpress 200M IGP

Hi,

The advent 7105 laptop that i am thinking of getting comes with these graphics. Does anyone know what specs and features it`s got? Does it have HardWare Transform & Lighting? I`ve heard that some `new` games run better with this, why is that and what does HWT&L do?

Thanks, Dan

This item was edited on Wednesday, 30th August 2006, 13:25

The Radeon Xpress 200M is NOT a graphics processor. It is a chipset based on the Xpress 200 but designed for laptops. The graphics processing built into the Northbridge of the chipset is based on an ATI x300 which will not play the latest games and unfortunately provides software T&L under DirectX 9.0c.

Hardware T&L obviously runs faster because the transformations are performed within a dedicated GPU rather than the PC`s CPU. Performing tasks in hardware frees up the CPU to perform other tasks.

In general, if you want graphics performance, then a coarse measurement would be to multiply the number of pipelines by the clock speed to get an idea of speed. A high speed GPU does not mean a fast graphics card if the number of pipelines is low so a 500MHz GPU with 8 pipelines is slower than a graphics card with a 375MHz GPU but 16 pipelines. The higher the pipelines (pixel and vertex) the more operations are performed per clock cycle. Like CPUs bigger isn`t always better.

This item was edited on Wednesday, 30th August 2006, 17:43

oh right, so would it not be able to play the latest games at all or just slowly?

It won`t run games like Call of Duty and it manages a whopping 3 frames per second in Doom 3 with anti-aliasing off. That will give you an idea of what you will get with the x300 based graphics, I`m afraid.