AMD 780G Chipset and Athlon X2 4850e Preview

Valve’s Half Life 2 looks great, no doubt. But it’s also an immersive game made that much better by a great story line. The DirectX 9 engine provides attractive visuals without bogging down capable GPUs. To get a good feel for how these integrated solutions handled the game’s eye candy, we cranked up the settings, taking care to keep anti-aliasing off with trilinear filtering.

It goes without saying that despite its hardware-based shader engine and DirectX 10 support, Intel’s G35 chipset can’t muster the horsepower to even make 800x600 a playable resolution. The 780G, on the other hand, delivers reasonable frame rates at 800x600 and near-playable numbers at 1024x768. When you take the step up to a 780G platform and a Radeon HD 3450 running Hybrid Graphics, 800x600 and 1024x768 both turn into valid resolutions.