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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."
And it will suck forevermore. It's integrated graphics, thus it shares RAM with the CPU. Ergo, it will suck forever.
As long as ATI makes real graphics cards, they will be in the competition for perf. As soon as they stop, they're leaving nVidia with the monopoly on real good GPUs.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
AMD's processors kick butt, however.
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.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Wait, I thought it was nVidia that has the weak drivers for graphics cards, not ATI. Or is that just for Linux?
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 and release to release, but its close and the advantage can swing either way. However, there's a very small but rather vocal minority of users that have conflicts between Nvidia's drivers and something else in their system who like to complain a lot about them.