AMD's Hybrid Graphics Unveiled, Tested

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."

More good reviews

[Vigile]

There are some other good looks at RS780 performance:

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

Re:Risky Submission

[Guspaz]

Previous gen onboard graphics (this new stuff is DX10) was capable of running Aero. The requirements for Aero aren't terribly demanding, far less than an actual game.

Re:Who cares, it sucks

[BTG9999]

If you would RTFA you would have read that it is possible for motherboard to have dedicated ram for the integrated video card since AMD put a memory interface on the northbridge.

Re:Risky Submission

[everphilski]

Sure, but my $300 laptop has an onboard GeForce 6 series chip. Just got to avoid Intel graphics like the plague and you'll be fine.

Re:Who cares, it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

The motherboard's BIOS lets you borrow 128, 256 or 512 MB of RAM from the system's RAM, to allocate it as video memory to the integrated GPU. For the first time ever, AMD is also equipping its integrated graphics chip with a separate memory interface. This allows motherboard makers and OEMs to provide dedicated graphics memory for the integrated chip directly on the board, if they find the GPU's performance unsatisfactory, or don't wish to use a shared-memory solution. In effect, this transforms the integrated on-chip graphics solution into a dedicated graphics card that just happens to reside in the northbridge

Link [tomshardware.com]. You're right that it is currently limited due to the RAM-sharing, but you are wrong that it will necessarily suck forever. There's no telling yet how the dedicated memory channel will affect performance. Who knows? Perhaps it will move out of the realm of suck.

Re:3-way SLI?

[djtachyon]

Well I have a 3-Way SLI nVidia motherboard now. The only current chipsets to support it are the nVidia 680i/780i/790i chipsets. Only catch is that no PCIe2.0 nVidia cards support Triple-SLI. So you have to use either the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra. Not sure why TFA is vague on this.

Re:Past history

[edwdig]

Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days. There's a reason they're absolutely bleeding money: they're being killed in all segments of the processor market by Intel.

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.

Re:Beware onboard video for 1080p HTPC.

[Pulzar]

I just kind of assumed it'd be able to do fullscreen video at 1920x1080, but it is very choppy. Something to consider when looking for an HTPC.

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 this one :).

Re:Past history

[Kjella]

Ever since the Core processors came on the market, Intel has had power parity or better. Even the fastest Intel E8500 3.16 GHz operates with a TDP of 65 watts, the regular 4600+ has TDP of 89 watts unless you have the EE edition. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation [wikipedia.org]. Note that TDP = Thermal Design Power and doesn't say much about how much it really draws, but in general you can see where it gets bumped up. For example, the E4300 1.80 GHz has the same TDP as the previously mentioned E8500 3.16 GHz, but you can be sure it draws a lot less than that while the E8500 is probably quite close.

Re:No future in it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this has always been the case and PC's are still around. You can't play cutting edge games without new cutting edge new technologies. Don't mistake the move to consoles as something to do with graphics, gaming companies say it's more of a response to piracy.