Benchmarks/demos which will show capabilities of decent graphics card?

"You could find the official demos for your card. http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_nvidia.html was where they used to be last time I had an nvidia based card, though there don't seem to be any specific to the 9xxx series there (the 8xxx series demos should be impressive enough though and have no hope of working properly on the old integrated chip).

Also, like lvo suggests, playing one of your existing games with the resolution and quality settings whacked up should be a good test too.

Screen savers like the ""really slick"" set may also be a good choice. Though they are getting a bit old (so not as demanding as they could be of modern kit), I've never seen an integrated graphics chipset do any justice at all to ""hyperspace""."

"If you mean their graphical capability, in terms of what features they support, rather than performance, then you most likely want to look at demos of the different graphics engine versions, rather than cards themselves. For example, a card that supports only DirectX 9 will not have the same visual capabilities as a card that support DirectX 10. Two cards that support DirectX 10.1 should theoretically produce identical graphics when playing a DirectX 10.1 game. There are occasionally bugs in the drivers that cause artifacts, or other quality issues that create problems. There are also user controlled driver settings that can change how the game renders, but the point being that the capabilities are that defined by the DirectX standard that the card supports.

As part of the card's specifications, it will list the DirectX version, as well as the OpenGL version it supports. This is the main specification that differentiates one cards graphical capabilities from another. There are some proprietary capabilities, but I would guess most game developers don't use these, as it would mean their effort in implementing those features would only be seen on certain video cards.

Here's one I've seen used before, links for installer are on this page:
http://www.unigine.com/download/"