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AMD's Hybrid Graphics Unveiled, Tested
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Mar 04, 2008 03:21 PM
from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.
from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.
ThinSkin writes "The combination of AMD's ATI graphics division and AMD's CPU division means that AMD often fights a two-front war, directly competing against Intel in the CPU business as well as Nvidia in graphics. AMD's Hybrid Graphics technology allows them to fight against both companies at the same time. Inserting an additional card works the same as CrossFire, which, like Nvidia's SLI, was only capable by having two discrete graphics cards installed on a motherboard. ExtremeTech has put the 780G chipset through a series of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to see just how beneficial this technology is. HotHardware has a similar rundown on the technology. The results indicate that Hybrid Graphics aren't yet ideal for the power-hungry gamer, as driver revisions need to be ironed out at this early stage, but performance looks promising."
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They also need to test HyperFlash that is in sb7xx (Score:2)
Re:Who cares, it sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Re:Who cares, it sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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In what way do you think having an upgradable graphics card is *any* use to someone not buying a machine on the strength of its graphics card?
What are these mythical people going to use the extra GFX ram for ?
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More good reviews (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=527 [pcper.com] - looks at Hybrid CrossFire with several games in real world testing as well as GPU overclocking; also features the new AMD X2 4850e processor
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/780g-and-4850e/ [techwarelabs.com] - looks at both the chipset and CPU
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261 [techreport.com] - good motherboard review
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 [bit-tech.net] - tests HQV and HD audio systems
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They're not terrible, they're just not quite as good as Intel's at the moment.
Terrible is things like Via processors or Transmeta or the other junk you normally wouldn't even consider.
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AMD tends to be smaller, more agile, but slower at the evolutionary tweaks than Intel. Intel's sheer size gives them an edge on the drudgery of small performance and cost optimizations, but they are so big that the "outside the bo
Re:Past history (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days.
Um, no. Last year I got an Athlon X2 4600+ (65 watts max) and it does everything I need, and the stock HSF is almost silent. I seriously doubt an Intel processor could do everything this processor does for me, for the same amount of money. And no, I can't overclock because I can't risk the math errors.
It's silly to compare the processors based on those commonly used benchmarks (Quake? WTF?). Even those artificial benchmarks which purport to demonstrate number crunching speed are not as useful as you might think. I could do just as well with an Intel processor, but it will cost me significantly more money to do so because the Intel motherboards and processors are more expensive. I suppose if I played games I would buy a really fast Intel processor, crank the voltage, run a really loud HSF to keep it cool, and curse AMD for not providing me with this wonderful oppotunity. But alas, I don't.
Parent
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Terrible? Not at all. AMD is still producing very good processors. They were also first up with proper quad-core chips. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips. They're very good. Likewise in the server market their quad core Opterons are excellent. I'm buying exclusively AMD at the moment.
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"Proper" quad-core chips? What kind of performance gains are those getting you over a C2Q? (The answer is "just about none.")
Opterons are the only place in the market where AMD is competitive. There is literally no reason t
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They were terrible just before Intel launched the Core2Duo: They only cared about the most profitable segments, being too expensive in the high end, and that happened just because limited production capacity, so they could not provide the market with a whole array of products from low end to ultra high end.
AMD was much better several years ago, with much more bang for the buck than Intel in the segments I usually buy, not the highest end, but still providing competitive value f
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So basically where the Core 2 Duos are kicking ass and taking names? Come on, I understand the fanboy attitude but there's nothing to recommend AMD at present outside of the server market. Intel's equal-or-better in power consumption and better in performance. They're not competitive for the price by any stretch.
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I also said they were much better several years ago. And several means like 1999. So there's another fact.
Intel is better now, they are better since mid 2006, BUT I DIDN'T SAID IT. Is that such a huge problem?
I doesn't mean that I don't know about it, just that this was an AMD discussion so I though it was not relevant to the point (That AMD lost their soul by getting too greedy in 2005, and never recovered i
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Nvidia's primary advantage is their drivers. They've always been leaps and bounds above ATI's. They go back and forth on who has the better hardware. When ATI has the advantage in raw power, it's often canceled by the lower quality of the drivers.
Nvidia's Linux drivers are generally excellent, usually offering performance similar to the Windows drivers. There's a little variance from model to model
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The sort that don't like having their machine rooted by their binary blob video driver
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
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Is that supposed to mean its ok if your machine get rooted due to an open source video driver?
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
If they're complaining about Nvidia's Linux drivers not working on their system, then they're rather stupid, don't you think?
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
Publicly available hardware documentation is a
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It's is the preferred option over binary blob, yes
New blobs take considerably longer than source code mods
Risky Submission (Score:5, Funny)
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To bring decent-end graphics to the mass consumer market to run Vista's Aero Glass & Friends as well as some games.
I feel this (in it's current state) is more a shove at Intel's GMA graphics processors than anything.
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Re:Risky Submission (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Risky Submission (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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There's nothing wrong with Intel graphics (Score:2)
I bought my laptop just for compatibility testing (I write 3D graphics software) and the graphics have been very stable and surprisingly fast. Intel drivers have always been good. I'm still not sure there's working drivers for the latest ATI/NVIDIA cards (I've had an unusable ATI 2600 HD sitting on my desk for the last six mon
Re:Risky Submission (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
3-way SLI? (Score:3, Insightful)
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of course, the article doesn't explicitly say 2 cards are needed.. It's referring to the fact that onboard graphics were previously replaced by PCI/AGP/PCI-E graphics cards, and that the two systems wouldn't work together at all.
I can't say for sure (i haven't read up on it properly yet), but what AMD appear to have done is made it possible to have an SLI-style system that is capable of using onboard graphics and PCI-E graphics at the same
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Perhaps, however, it would have been less confusing if they'd said "two (or more)". Note that they say "like Crossfire", which can certainly support more than 2 cards.
If you assume they're talking about the difference between two mounted cards and one mounted card working with onboard graphics, it makes a lot more sense.
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Wrong article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
ATI is in commpetition with Nvidia
AMD + ATI is in competition with INTEL
Which video chipset manufacturer has the majority of the market? ATI? Nvidia? Matrox? No, Intel does. In fact Intel has more market share then ATI and Nvidia combined. I highly doubt the gamer market will be very high on the uptake of not being able to upgrade their video card. As such this must be aimed more at the integrated mainboard chipset market where Nvidia isn't even a very big player.
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First, AMD and ATI are the same company, and the company is named AMD. ATI is a brand used for AMD's graphics solutions.
Second, AMD and NVIDIA are very much in competition, both in discrete graphics AND in core logic (chipsets).
Incorrect. AMD and NV both have around 28% of the market, Intel has about 40%, and the balance is controlled by VIA
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This mistake was totally non-existent back in 2003. Don't know why it caught up.
Beware onboard video for 1080p HTPC. (Score:3, Interesting)
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That's the whole "point" of AMD780 -- it's the first one that can do it, and do it very well. It has built-in video decoders to handle even the most demanding blueray DVDs. On top of actually being able to play most new games, and pretty much all new DX10 games when you add a $50 video card and run them together.
So, yes -- beware of onboard video, but only before thi
Dear AMD CEO (Hector Ruiz), (Score:3, Insightful)
No future in it (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in a rather lengthy conversation last week about the future of gaming on computers. Conclusion is that games are not going to survive long on computers for the primary reason that they are far too costly to support. The natural development is to move into highly specialized hardware and better manage the video requirements.
Here's the core of the problem: The video card becomes the single most expensive piece of hardware in a workstation chassis. Within six months I am buying games that marginally run on the equipment and at the end of the year I'm pretty much out. Even at the time of purchase, some video games won't run on the hardware. And gaming is the only segment of the software industry that is pushing against this hardware limitation. Office products, web browsers, email applications do not require this heavy hardware.
There is an increasing movement from desktop to a more distributed/mobile environment of notebooks and central workstations that act as servers for print, file, proxy applications. Notebooks are not built with 100W video cards. But notebooks are what you get when you go to college.
With the advent of PS3, Xbox360, Wii there are specialized pieces of hardware that are intended for gaming and have fixed hardware capabilities. These are the new gaming environments that people are moving into. The issue now is for them to solve how to do MMORPG and similar game constructs under this hardware platform. But by moving game development into this environment there is zero work they have to do in order to get the hardware compatability solved like they do with computers. It's a fixed environment.
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The problem with the PC is, to plug in that video card you also need a new PCI-X motherboard. Which means you also need a new processor, new RAM, and it's SATA so your old hard disk and DVD drive don't work, so you need to buy them again. Then you need a new power box with all the new fangled connectors to get it all
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Nobody with any kind of experience with computers and mathematics would, in their right mind, even expect any sort of integrated FPU to excel at floating point, so why even mention it? What, because it gives the summary and article an extra bit of filler to make it look longer?