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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."
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
...but can it run Aero in Vista?
If SLI can only do 2 cards, what was that when they did 3-way SLI a couple months ago?
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.
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.
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.
Hell, forget non-gamers... what about mobile users? I've found that many times it's just the graphics chip in my laptops that are too slow. It'd be great to be able to just pop a new chip in there. Most notebooks don't have upgradeable graphics, and when they do, they still suck.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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...
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.
I've noticed that AMD tends to leapfrog Intel in a really big way every few years, then Intel slowly catches up and maybe passes them for a while with evolutionary changes. Then AMD hits another "breakthrough" that blows Intel totally out of the water again for a couple of years.
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 box" thinking needed to really innovate is lost in committee before AMD releases the product.
Right now, Intel has the upper position. Give it a year or two...
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.
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. 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.
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