The moment of truth has come. How well can the X1250 IGP handle games and Video applications? We fired up 3D Mark 05/06 and we got the following results:

Ok, apparently, this card cannot be used to play serious 3D games. However, it will do just fine for everyday use and general applications. Let's now move on to the most interesting stuff, Video playback performance.

For all tests, we used the following system configuration:

• Motherboard: Biostar TA690GAM2
• CPU: AMD 3600+ 65W
• Memory: 1GB OCZ PC2-7200EPP@400MHz-4-4-4-8
• HDD: Western Digital 36GB Raptor
• Optical: LG GBW-H10N (DVD/Blu-Ray capable)
• OS: Windows VISTA 32Bit with all latest updates installed
• Software Player: PowerDVD 7.3 with Video Acceleration enabled
• Blu-Ray Disc: Casino Royal (50GB Sized with Mpeg4 AVC)

So what we have here is a low cost home theatre PC configuration, capable of playing back even Blu-Ray content, at least according to the specs. The AMD 3600+ is the lowest priced processor you can buy nowadays, 1GB of memory is enough for most applications, the optical drive from LG can read/burn Blu-Ray movies and the software player (PowerDVD) is able to playback all video content available on the market. Of course, we installed all required video codecs, like Xvid/ND and VC1 with the latest revisions for optimum results. We used VISTA 32bit for our evaluation, since it is the most recent operating system and we could say offers the "worst" possible performance, since we know that at least with the current setup, XP is faster.

The test results are very encouraging for the IGP X1250, even under Windows VISTA 32bit. First of all, you can playback DVD-Video and Mpeg4 ASP content with very low CPU usage. With High Definition content, CPU usage rises up to 99% in the case of Blu-Ray. Remember, that Casino Royal is considered the first "real" Blu-ray disc, since it uses the Mpeg4 AVC codec with most cases higher than 25Mbit/sec Video bitrate. That should be a very difficult test for the ATI X1250. The Video playback was very choppy during the fast scenes, where the bitrate exceeded 25mbit/sec. With a higher powered CPU or more memory, or even switching to XP, it may solve this problem. In any case, we are very satisfied with the ATI X1250 IGP as an inter grated Video card. It is |almost perfect for building a home theatre PC.