integrate video cards as a whole are alot worse. This is in laptops and PCs, it is just more pronounced on laptops. This is because integrated video cards actually utilise the laptops/PCs resources due to lack of its own. An integrated videocard actually designates a large amount of system RAM for its own uses, so in a game such as planeshift with its larger quality textures, this small amount of allocated memory is quickly saturated.
An integrated GPU also utilises the sytem CPU for alot of its calculations. This results in very poor performance because a CPU is not optimised for this type of instruction set and therefore performs the task very poorly and slowly.
Perhaps the biggest performance problem with integrated video is that the motherboard is actually built to perform with that GPU for everyday cenarios and not gaming. What this means is that the bus speeds, access speeds, bandwidth etc are all alot worse between the GPU and the CPU and ram, when compared to a AGP slot card.
However, even if you upgrade your video card via an AGP slot. You will most likely find that this card actually performs alot slower in thismotherboard then a motherboard without onboard video. This is because the AGP is then treated as second rate in its design and is slightly slower. The bios etc is also specifically designed towards onboard, and so never utilises an AGP slot video card the same as a normal motherboard.
The same goes for onboard sound. OnBoard sound actually uses the CPU for all of its processing, and this very significantly reduces performance for gaming. So when choosing a PC you should always choose a motherboard without integrated sound and video, because you can never completely undo the performance problems that result from an integrated motherboard system.
I understand that most of us out there cant afford to buy a new PC for Planeshift, but there are cheap ways to do it, and if you do your homework you can find a system that produces 70% of the performance for less then half the price. My personal recommendation would be maybe a pentium 4 2.8, 512MB ram, and a radeon 9600 256MB. This sytem can be bought very cheaply, and runs planeshift at 1024x768 resolution with no problems
