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."

Re:Risky Submission

[PrescriptionWarning]

aye, but there's a difference between minimum requirements and recommended requirements. Quality and response time are what you'll notice in Aero between a simply on board accelerator and say a Geforce 5 series or higher

Re:3-way SLI?

[Gideon Fubar]

no it doesn't... it say that this system can only be used by having two cards mounted on the motherboard. Necessary and sufficient conditions.

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.

Beware onboard video for 1080p HTPC.

[benow]

I picked up a HTPC with onboard nvidia gfx and while it's great for everything else, it has a hard time with 1080p. 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. There must be reviews of onboard graphics out there...

Re:Wrong article summary

[MorpheousMarty]

I highly doubt the gamer market will be very high on the uptake of not being able to upgrade their video card.

You can add a video card of your choice, and you can even set it up in a hybrid crossfire configuration with compatible cards, with good results [tomshardware.com]. As a gamer on a budget this definitely grabs my attention.

No future in it

[tacocat]

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.