In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Intel 865G are significantly better than the Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra.

The 865G was released over three years more recently than the Riva TNT2 Ultra, and so the 865G is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Riva TNT2 Ultra when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful GPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

The Riva TNT2 Ultra has 16 MB more video memory than the 865G, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Riva TNT2 Ultra also has superior memory performance overall.

The Riva TNT2 Ultra has 2.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 865G, which means that the memory performance of the Riva TNT2 Ultra is marginally better than the 865G.

The Riva TNT2 Ultra has 2 Shader Processing Units and the 865G has 0. The two GPUs are based on different architectures, but deliver an equivalent shader performance. To compare, we must continue to look at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, we sadly do not have enough data in this area to complete the comparison.

The 865G requires 13 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Riva TNT2 Ultra.