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AMD's Hybrid Graphics Unveiled, Tested

Posted by Zonk on from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.

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."

9 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. More good reviews by Vigile · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Risky Submission by imstanny · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...but can it run Aero in Vista?

    1. Re:Risky Submission by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:Risky Submission by Mex · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's "Vista Capable", so... no! ;)

    3. Re:Risky Submission by everphilski · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:Who cares, it sucks by BTG9999 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Who cares, it sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. 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.
  5. Wrong article summary by archen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Past history by twistedcubic · · Score: 3, Insightful


    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.