Getting past the birth sequence was only the beginning of the glitches associated with crappy intel drivers. Notably, the heads of NPC's would rotate at impossible angles i.e. as if they were zombies with no neckbones. There was also a lack of walk cycle animations. Occasionally it would look like the characters were skating on one leg up stairs. Overall the experience felt very much like playing a surreal version of paper mario as most of the animations were not able play out. Targeting in FP was much easier though.

Considering the limitations, I was actually surprised to be able to progress all the way to the Brotherhood of Steel outpost. However, the game again froze when the elder wanted to talk to my character. I was able to avoid the freeze by running to the door and avoiding contact with him. My victory was short lived when I realized another animation sequence would be required before I could get power armor.

At this point, I gave up. For those interested, you can skip the training montage by using a gamebryo console command to enable power armor wearing.

If you like your games with an extra sidequest of avoiding glitches and watching skating zombies, then playing FO3 on a core i processor is for you. Otherwise, get AMD.

UPDATE: The game works completely fine on second gen core i. All you need to do is get the updated directx9 dll and the game will think your graphics card is an Nvidia 9700.