Geforce 9400/9300 & Hybrid SLI versus Intel G45

The new chips of the Geforce family are integrated graphics processors. Both, the Geforce 9300 and the Geforce 9400 don't have dedicated video memory. Therefore they have to use a part of the system memory (512 MiByte at max) to store their data. DDR2 800 and DDR3 1333 are supported - the motherboard producer decides which kind is used. For our tests we used a 512 MiByte framebuffer.

The only difference between the 9400 and the 9300 is that they have different clock speeds: The latter one runs a t 450/1,200 MHz and the other one at 580/1,400. The calculating units are the same for both cards: 16 Shader ALUs (4 Vec4) and four texture units.



There is only little information about Intel's G45. It uses 10 so called "Execution Units” - possibly 10 Shader ALUS and the same number of texture units. The Intel graphics unit matches the same DirectX specification as the Nvidia solutions: The hardware supports DX10. The G45 also uses the system memory to store data.

Geforce 9400/9300: Novelties
The new thing about the Intel excusive IGPs is the support of Hybrid SLI. Both can be linked with a Geforce 8400 Gs or 8500 GT to work on Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). The exchange of data is routed over the PCI Express interface - a SLI bridge is not required. The 9500 GT and the 9400 GT are currently not running in Hybrid SLI on those boards. Also you should bear in mind that the feature is Vista exclusive.