ATi's Radeon IGP320M Chipset A New Chance For Athlon Notebooks

16. Impact Of Allocated Frame Buffer Size On 3D Performance

Radeon IGP320M is a chipset that uses a part of main memory for its integrated graphics core. The BIOS of our test notebook allowed us to adjust the amount of memory that would be allocated by the graphics subsystem. While all other benchmarks were executed at the highest setting of 128 MB to achieve maximum performance, I wanted to see how smaller frame buffer sizes impact the 3D performance of Radeon IGP.

Frame buffer size does not exactly have a huge influence on 3DMark 2001 SE scores. Only 16 MB doesn't seem to be a good choice. From 32 MB upwards, the performance increase is marginal. However, the impact of the frame buffer size does of course depend on the 3D-application. Some games may indeed benefit a lot from a large frame buffer, other may hardly care at all. In any event, you can of course reduce the frame buffer size to 16 MB for the times when you don't play any 3D-games on your notebook, to subsequently increase the amount of system main memory.