Gah! Intergrated chipset evil!

So I was over a friends house today to play with his spangly new computer, several games underarm I checked the pc's specs everything checked out multicore this gigabytes that but wait! GAH! What was this an Integrated Intel chipset? Something which in some of the more nerdier circles is whispered in hushed tones of revulsion. He would be unable to play most of the games I had brought and the ones he could run would be reduced to 'orrible juddery slide shows of PC gaming's current finest.

Why the hell do Intel do this? They dress up these things to read like the second coming of the electronic messiah in advertisements but when you get down to it there about as powerful as a calculator, like every other sector of the hardware league Intel and AMD are in a constant battle to produce the fastest zippiest processor, even at the budget end of the spectrum there processors are still more than adequate to run a modern game respectably so why are there graphic chipsets so crap?

Of course you could argue that these onboard graphic chipsets aren't really graphics sets but merely something to display windows, perhaps display video and the ever cheeky office game of solitaire, while it falls to dedicated video card makers ATI and NVIDIA to produce something that caters to anybody wanting to do anything more demanding than run Windows but with the recent purchase of ATI by Intel rival AMD this has been put into question.

Microsoft's next iteration of Windows Vista, has a new graphical interface named Aero glass that pretty much demands a card capable of displaying these complex graphical titbits, a bog standard Intel integrated job by simply won't cut it. This coupled with the ever increasing popularity of high definition video endures that the casual e-mail sending, web surfing pc user is going to require something much more powerful.

Of course its the corporations that ultimately control this, PC makers such as Dell concentrate on the more recognisable indicators of a systems power in advertisements when targeting there casual pc using audience the choice of graphic chipsets often seems like second fiddle to the more recognisable representations of a pc's power namely a headline dominating processor speed and ram size these are the numbers the general public understands, so long as it sounds big and flashy its ok.

Additionally its companies like Dell's biggest customers that also effects this the most not the casual pc user but the IT sectors of gigantic corporations if it costs a IT manager an additional $5 to increase the graphics chipset to something approaching respectable speed what’s the harm but increase that over 50,000 pc's and suddenly you see why graphic cards are sill are luxury.