I'm still very far from being "sold" on using any integrated video chip solutions for any kind of production oriented graphics computer.
First, the electronics sales people at any Best Buy or whatever retail store du jour all have a vested interest in trying to push off the garbage they cannot manage to sell.
I have caught many electronics guys in outright lies trying to claim certain products did something they actually did not do at all. For instance, back when DVD was just getting a toe hold in the market place lots of sales droids would try to claim a mere Dolby Pro-Logic equipped receiver had full blown DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 decoding when a simple glance through the manual would reveal otherwise. Often these sales people just have to say anything to get the product sold, otherwise they face getting the axe. Heck, many stores demand they get so many maintenance agreements sold with the product or they face getting terminated.
The management for many computing and electronics stores has an attitude that the product does not necessarily have to be good. It just has to be bought. With that, I always must examine their claims of what's good enough for me for any motive of bias.
It is a fact any computer using an integrated video acceleration chip on a motherboard is going to be slower than a dedicated video card with its own on board memory separate from the main system. The memory is only one issue. You also have the issue of bus speed between the accelerator chip(s) and memory. Main board bus speeds are very slow compared to that of dedicated graphics boards.
Now those guys at Best Buy or whereever may claim an integrated solution is "good enough." But then they don't know what applications all of us use and what we're doing with those applications. I can ask certain tasks of Photoshop or After Effects that will bring even the most well equipped computer systems to their knees. New versions of applications like Photoshop demand even more from computer systems. My notebook computer has a dedicated PCI-X card, but I still needed to max out its RAM to 2GB to get rid of some lag still present in PhotoshopCS2. Windows Vista is going to demand a lot more in the manner of system performance, probably more than a lot of low cost integrated graphics chip systems will be able to support. I'll probably only get Vista loaded on a new machine with all new hardware rather than buy an upgrade of it to load on any older machine.
