Slashdot Mirror
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."
I had to do this once.
They also need to test HyperFlash that is in SB 7xx and how many boards will use the 2 usb 1.1 ports for mouse and key board?
There are some other good looks at RS780 performance:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=527 - 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/ - looks at both the chipset and CPU
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261 - good motherboard review
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 - tests HQV and HD audio systems
I love how ExtremeTech loves to put like 30 words on a page. What an eye sore. The HH story linked there is much better.
...but can it run Aero in Vista?
...780G-based platform that idles under 80W and runs under full load at 155W. But then AMD adds an element much less common in the integrated world: great performance, regardless of whether you're executing threaded audio encoding software, the latest gaming titles, or even a simple file compression routine. Inclusion of AMD's full UVD gives the chipset real video decoding chops, too. http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_780G_Chipset_and_Athlon_X2_4850e_Preview_/
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.
If SLI can only do 2 cards, what was that when they did 3-way SLI a couple months ago?
If we have to rely on ATI's driver writing abilities, I'm not going to have much confidence in it.
Unless I hear rave reviews, I'm sticking with nVidia, thank you very much. AMD's processors kick butt, however.
Personally, I've always wondered about the ATI purchase. Considering AMD's long history with nVidia, that company would have been a far better fit as far as creating total quality solutions go.
Nobody in with any kind of experience with computers and gaming would who's in their right mind would even expect any sort of onboard or hybrid gpu to excel at gaming, so why even mention it? What, because it gives the summary and article an extra bit of filler to make it look longer?
well guys i am from a different field was was going through all your conversation for a long time. how do you guys identify a platform? say for instance lets take a web site designing site in Mumbai called www.HugeH.com . how do i identify about the platforms used in it? http://www.hugeh.com/ plz help thanks akshay
Perhaps this may be AMD/ATI's crack at the science rendering market that nVidia has locked down pretty well. If I remember right AMD/ATI released the specs on some of their cards for this kind of work, maybe developing this is a logical step for them in gaining this part of the market as well as a simple way to diversify their products by, counterintuitivly in a way I suppose, combining two of their markets.
Future. The 4and Real problems that
There's one benefit to it being there. As a known coprocessor for those doing CUDA.
AMD is in competition with Intel
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.
I thought that hybrid graphics was the cpu and gpu on the same die. Integrated graphics is pretty much the norm, with predictable performance increases each year.
Actually, hybrid graphics merely supplement a traditional graphics engine with an electrical counterpart.
not going home to die. I will jam project. Today, as www.anti-slash.org FreeBSD's Already 4ware, *bSD [anti-slash.org] alike to reap we need to address that comprise
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...
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=225061,00.asp
I understand that they are merging to similar things, however this is not necessarily good for them. Sure they have consolidated their products (to some extent), however this only puts a greater managing burden on them selves. Do they err on the side of the processor, or the graphics processor? Which gets more attention and money?
Since they can't drop the original architecture just yet, I see this as now fighting a front on 3 sides.
Someone should smack them with the Wealth Of Nations, we divide labour around because nobody can do everything perfectly!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
None of that hardware matters if the drivers suck. Please hire some good driver developers.
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.
I wondered how long it would take them to find a way to truly lock in their products all the way to the graphics card. If this catches on, they finally have. Remember back when you could put any brand of processor in your motherboard? Then they got rid of that. Then they started releasing their own north bridges and spread rumors that if you used their brand of north bridge with their brand of graphics card it could run faster. Then, they tried to go even further and tell everyone that if you used their brand of north bridge, video card, and CPU all together with their "Spider" "platform" that it would have some kind of magical, proprietary speed increase, like you were supposed to be glad that they're taking steps to kill more standards and further control the market.
Sorry AMD, I believe in standards and in competition. Make me a CPU and a video card that can work in any computer so that we can get true benchmark comparisons of your products and have the flexibility to do things like easily put in a replacement if your friend's hardware device X dies suddenly.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
My laptop has an Intel 945 chipset and it runs just fine. My friend has Vista on his and Aero runs no problem (and so it should, Aero is just image compositing, not vertex processing).
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 months because there's no working driver for it, NVIDIA aren't all that much better)
The only problems are lack of 3D antialiasing and the vertex processing is in software, though it isn't anywhere near as slow as I expected after all the trashing they get from script kiddies.
They're no good for gaming, sure... but there's absolutely nothing wrong with them for everybody else.
No sig today...
Gee, those catalyst drivers work so well right now, I wonder what the holdup could be?