I have sold my rather mediocre Geforce 8600GT graphics card with the aim of buying a more powerful and updated card. So I was therefore forced to use my previously overlooked Intel 82945G inbuilt graphics solution. The most obvious thing i had to do was swap the previous DVI cable, that went from my monitor to GPU, to a standard, old-style, analog cable to my motherboard, as it obviously doesn't support DVI. Fortuntely my LCD supports both DVI and analog connections, otherwise I would be without a computer!
Two things really suprised me :
1) The performance and capability of the integrated chipset.
2) The efficiency of using an analog, instead of digital LCD connection for non-native or lower resolution, non-widescreen 4:3 games, or newer games that i intentionally run at 'inferior' or lower resolutions to make them more 'playable'.
After updating the integrated chipset drivers and tweaking a few settings I tested a few games with FRAPS and they ran very well, exceeding my expectations by far. "Old" 3d games such as half life and Deus Ex ran flawlessly on virtually all highest settings and native resolution(where available), as would be expected, since current integrated chipsets are much better than antiquated or legacy 3d accelerators from the late 1990s-early 2000s. On newer games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 it held up very nicely on a lower resolution with all details down and still looked reasonable. Admittedly, some games outright refused to load, but with some tweaking, research, and patch updates it is possible, for many problematic games, or so I have heard. Integrated graphics have definitely come along way the past few years, which is reassuring for the future of mainstream, low-end gaming for the masses! Definitely a large segment of the wider population that should not be overlooked by developers and hardware makers alike.
Now that leads me to my second observation. My 22" LCD's standard resolution is 1680x1050 but I play many games lower than native resolution. This is either because the game is old and doesn't support higher/widescreen resolutions or, as is usually the case, I am forced to reluctantly lower the resolutions of newer games to make them 'playable' and get an acceptable FPS. This inevitably leads to nasty interpolation of the output, specifically, blurry and less defined images. If you can get over the dilution in image quality and clarity induced by the depreciating effects of interpolation then you must still make a trade-off between having black bars on either side of the screen to preserve native aspect ratio or crudely 'fill to screen' on all output, which literately stretches the image to fit the width of the monitor. I usually play with black bars but you loose around 20-30% of the screen space and it always feels underoptimised and somewhat cramped on the screen. Using the full width option is a very crude technique and usually achieves mixed results, most games look acceptable, but the width screen ratio is out and horizontal figures look rather short and fat, basically it screws up your aspect ratio. There are 'widescreen hacks' but most are cumbersome and time consuming to apply to each game when you are always installing and uninstalling games. Upon using the analog cable I was delighted to realise that it does not suffer from interpolation like its digital counterpart. Images look sharp and well defined, even at very low resolutions. Also, strangely enough, images fit to the entire width of the screen without looking distorted or stretched. Maybe it is an illusion? Whenever I load a game in non-native resolution the monitor auto adjusts to optimise the picture on the screen.
It might sound like a step backwards but I am actually extremely happy with my humble integrated chipset and analog LCD connection. I can justify the compromise in graphics performance because images look better at lower resolutions and it didn't cost me anything extra with my computer purchase.
With the $80 i got for selling my 8600GT I can atleast hold-off and wait for the right time to purchase a better card for the right price. The 9600GT/9800GT or Radeon 4850 look very good, although my PSU would probably need to be upgraded to sufficiently power them. Apart from that deterant is the fact that most modern GPUs no longer support analog output connections which is sad because I think they are fabulous for handling multiple resolutions without the affects of interpolation or loss in true image quality. In native resolution, image quality seems comparable to digital, no real quality increase, despite the general concensus that digital is superior, maybe it is just me and my blindness, but I swear by it. I think I have written way too much, but just had to get this off my mind and would like to see what you guys think about this. Computer graphics sis something that intrigues me, it is like this perpetual and never-ending paradoxical compromise of performance vs quality , and hence vs cost, thrown in the mix for good measure. Every game I install I optimise and obsessively tweak settings for that 'sweet spot'. No two games are the same and some are more demanding than others depending on so many variables, and hardware is also extremely variable. ****, I could go on all out and splurge on a GTX280 for $500 and run virtually everything maxed out but that would take the fun out of it!!!
Some observations on using integrated graphics for gaming 
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