NVIDIA Quadro NVS 320M vs ATI Radeon Xpress X1270

NVIDIA Quadro NVS 320M

DirectX 10 medium class business graphic card, which is optimized for compatibility and stability. The graphic card seems to have the same core like the 8700M series and therefore shows good performance data.

A particularity of the graphic card are the "Unified Shaders". There don't exist any more dedicated pixel- and vertex shaders but 16 so called Stream processors maintain the upcomming graphic work (which was done by the pixel and vertex Shaders, up to now).

The memory clock of the Quadro NVS 320M depends on the implemented memory type: 400 MHz with GDDR2 and 700 MHz with GDDR3.

ATI Radeon Xpress X1270

The Radeon Xpress X1270 (RS690M) is an onboard graphics card for notebooks / laptops and according to AMD optimized for a good price/value. It is based on a X700 design but with less pixel- and vertex-pipelines.

The different RS600 and RS690 (Xpress X1200, X1250, and X1270) offer the same graphics core, but may have a different core clock. Still the performance should be compareable.

ATI Radeon Xpress X1270 is hardly apt for gamers. Only old games like Quake 3 Arena can be played in 1024x768 with high/medium details fluently. Even Warcraft 3 runs fluently with minimum details. Current, damanding games like FEAR, Doom3 and Quake 4 can hardly be played (e.g. 2 frames per second in battle scenes in Quake 4). Some strategy games like Age of Empires 3 can only be played with minimal details.

The graphic chip supports Windows Vista Aero surface and all 3D effects run fluently.

Technically the chip has 4 pixel-pipelines and either a texture unit (with 2 vertex shaders) or no vertex shaders (each source tells a different story).

The current consumption of the desktop version lies around 13.8 Watt (TDP) and 8 Watt average. The mobile versions could be more economic as they offer Powerplay support.