3D performance
Integrated graphics isn't known for exceptional 3D performance, but how does the 690G fare when we pit it against the GeForce 6150s?

Pretty well, at least in 3DMark06's graphics tests. Despite not being able to participate in the Shader Model 3.0 tests, which contribute to 3DMark06's overall score, the 690G still comes out ahead of the GeForce 6100s.

Part of the reason for the 690G's strong showing in 3DMark06 is its considerable fill rate advantage over the GeForce 6150s. This advantage is sizable in the single-texturing test, but even more pronounced with multi-texturing, where the 690G comes close to doubling the texel fill rate of the GeForce 6150 SE.

The 690G doesn't actually have a hardware vertex shader, so it uses the CPU to handle vertex processing. That pays dividends in 3DMark06's complex vertex shader test, but the GeForce 6100 family's on-chip vertex shader proves faster in the simple shader test.

Unfortunately, 3DMark06 has only one pixel shader test, and it returns the 690G to the back of the pack. The 690G's integrated Radeon X1250 does have more pixel shader units than the GeForce 6150s. The pixel shader processors from ATI and Nvidia differ in terms of the amounts and kinds of operations they can perform in a clock cycle, though, so pixel shader unit count alone doesn't determine performance.

Gaming
We could have limited our game testing to two- and three-year-old titles that might have been a better match for the horsepower of our chipsets' integrated graphics cores. However, even casual gamers want to play new releases, so we rounded up a series of recent titles to see how playable they were on the 690G. I'll give you a hint: not very.

For Oblivion and Battlefield 2, we used FRAPS to log frame rates over 90 seconds of gameplay. Average and low frame rates were then calculated, and we've presented the mean of the averages and the median of the low scores. With F.E.A.R., we used the game's internal performance test, which provides average and low frame rates.

We had to run Oblivion at its lowest detail levels, and even at an 800x600 display resolution, the 690G didn't average over 30 frames per second. At least it fared better than the GeForce 6150s, which struggled to hit 20 frames per second. What's even more painful, however, is to see Oblivion's once-gorgeous graphics reduced to absolute ugliness by the lowest detail settings.

Battlefield 2's low detail level allowed us to run it at a reasonable resolution of 1024x768, and the 690G was able to average over 30 frames per second without dipping below 20. That puts it ahead of the GeForce 6150s by a decent margin—one you definitely notice when playing the game.

The 690G takes top honors in F.E.A.R., as well, this time by a substantial margin over the GeForce 6150s. Note that the 690G's low frame rate is higher than the average for either of the GeForces.