An Ion is about as small a standard form factor as you can get (pico-itx). Once you look at the Ion for an HDTV platform, I don't think you'd go back looking at Intel's offering...
That's the way to go in the future. The ION is the NVIDIA 9400M chipset (used by Apple in their laptops) but paired with an low wattage Intel Atom CPU. The entire thing is designed around a tiny pico-itx board, and draws very little power and can be passively cooled.
But due to the use of the NVIDIA ION chipset the package can decode HD video and run Vista Premium (if you wanted to) something you can't do on Intel's stock platform of Atom + 945G for a chipset.
If all AMD wanted was the low end business market they could have passed on ATI, and just licensed a cheapo core from someone like SiS, or they could have even acquired S3.
They probably wanted some of the chipset design expertise of the ATI side to create a "Centrino" like platform. That and they thought that the CPU will want to incorporate some of the parallel features of the GPU (Google their Fusion CPU project).
I didn't say integrated graphics was bad. I was saying INTEL's graphics are bad.
Go check out the 790G chipsets from AMD and the 9300/9400 chipsets from NVIDIA.
Both are integrated mainboards, but have much better 3D and HD decoding than what's offered by Intel, even in Linux. These will work for you in an low profile home theater PC, and do a better job of it:).
Yea, and then ask more clued up friends why a game they just got runs like crap. Just because they don't care does not mean they don't use it.
That's exactly what I was getting at. I have friends who aren't die hard gamers who have no idea what a GPU is. But they still like to play games occasionally.
They go out and buy games like The Sims 2, Spore, or even World of Warcraft (yeah casual people play this) and get frustrated that it runs so poorly.
I hate to tell them that because they have a low end Intel integrated chip they're just screwed (especially friends with laptops where an upgrade is unheard of). Heck even the lowest end NVIDIA or ATI INTEGRATED chip is over 10 times faster than Intel, and honestly costs only a couple $ more.
Sure the NVIDIA/ATI integrated GPUs aren't top of the line, but at least with those the game is playable. I know someone who was trying to play some games on their Intel chipset and textures and some other affects are just missing.
True that people aren't looking for to play Crysis, but simple programs like Spore, and even Google Earth benefit from going to an NVIDIA or ATI integrated GPU. There's a visual quality upgrade on even these "casual" games as the Intel chips do such a poor job.
Also both the ATI and NVIDIA integrated chipsets do a better job of decoding HD video with less CPU usage. (Check out reviews of the ATI 790G and NVIDIA 9400M chipsets if you don't believe me.)
Plus with OpenCL we might start to see more regular applications accelerated on the GPU. Photoshop is accelerated when working with images, and both NVIDIA/ATI have programs which use the GPU to transcode video which people can use on their iPods, or share with family over the 'net.
I'm sure Apple has some cool ideas on how to use the GPU since they're heavily investing in OpenCL for Snow Leopard. That's probably partly why they went all NVIDIA on their notebook line.
If you're looking for accelerated MPEG4 and HD video playback you won't find that on the Intel board. While they support XvMC fairly well that only does MPEG2.
Last month they released some drivers for the VA-API but that's in their closed source binary blob driver which works very poorly on Linux.
NVIDIA has VDPAU support which will already allow you to play back HD streams without having to fork over for a more expensive, and hotter running CPU.
CPUs won't be going away, instead they're becoming less important and more of a commodity part. Which is what Intel is terrified of. Plus you'll still need something to run the OS and handle some IO while the GPU is crunching numbers.
Plus while the CPU might be dying (if you believe NVIDIA) we're not to the point you don't need one. Intel is the big player and if you want to ship products you need a platform to talk with the CPU.
Intel wants to throw hurdles in the way and delay NVIDIA until they launch their own GPU. If they didn't think this was where the market was going they probably wouldn't be spending so much effort on Larrabee.
Define sell. If you mean bundle for virtually free with CPU's (or in some cases cheaper than just a CPU, go Monopoly) then yes they do.
If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.
In fact they count sales of chipsets with integrated graphics as a graphics sale for market share even if that computer also has a discrete graphics card. So if you buy something with an NVIDIA or ATI card and a 945G chipset that counts as graphics sale for Intel even though the graphics chip is never used.
Their integrated graphics actually benchmarks slower than Microsoft's Software DirectX10 implementation (running on a Core i7). If people were more aware of just how poorly Intel integrated chips were they'd probably sell even less.
Sadly, most people aren't aware of the vast difference in performance, and just assume their computer is slow when Aero, The Sims, Spore or Google Earth run poorly.
Until Intel ships Larrabee we won't really know if they can ship a GPU, and that looks to be still over a year away.
You still fail. They aren't getting rid of the Mac client.
They expected the number of users of the Linux and Mac clients to grow. The mac user base has grown, but the Linux user base appears to have stagnated.
I like Blizzard but that's not how it works. You download and install the game before playing.
Turbine Games actually pioneered with Asheron's Call. Most of the patches were rather small and you got texture and map updates as you ran around the world. They did this since at the time everyone had dial-up and wanted to save people downloading stuff they didn't need.
You don't see multi-core GPU's 'cause there's no point. The GPU design is nothing like a CPU.
The GPU is already a collection of parallel cores, often called "shaders" (though NVIDIA and AMD are now branding them cores). These are what actually do the work. You can keep cramming more shaders into the chip and keep getting better performance, but at some point the chip gets too big to actually manufacture.
So basically there's no point of taking two GPU cores as they stand now and shrinking them together. You'd just end up with a less efficient design.
Of course the dual-GPU cards have some issues since you now have to distribute work between two different processors, yet they are hidden from the software stack so the dev only sees a single GPU. In this case you have a bunch of classic NUMA programming problems, but the software/game dev often doesn't take this into account. The drivers devs do their best to work around bottlenecks but they can only do so much.
This is often why some games can scale very well with SLI/Crossfire and others see no benefit. Those that see the biggest performance boosts avoid features/algorithms that don't scale well when adding multiple GPUs.
I wish they announced this before I got it for the PS3. I want to support DRM games and so far PoP seems like it might be fairly good.
My only problem is that it looks like it's designed as a console game and may play better on my PS3. So I worry PC sales will be weak compared to console and they'll blame piracy.
Last thing I want is Ubisoft to pick up with restrictive DRM again. I won't buy anything DRMed from them again since I got Spliter Cell: Chaos Theory and NEVER was able to play it. It's captacular Starforce protection never supported 64 bit Windows.
Little of each. Apple is really picky about picking hardware which correctly supports features such as power states. They also test with the hardware to make sure OS X works well with what they've chosen.
With Windows/Linux it's sort of a potluck grab bag, and you're at the mercy of a thousands of different vendors/driver writers to get something right.
Some OEMs might spend more time picking hardware with better support. But as the standard Windows computer competes on price, corner cutting is rampant.
I guess WoW runs "JUST FINE" on Linux, but it doesn't run WELL.
Last time I tried to get WoW working in Linux (about a year ago) it was a PITA to install and patch. And even once I got it running and the proper tweaks setup to fix a couple OpenGL problems I still couldn't get the game to play sound properly. It either started to stutter, or required a huge buffer such that sound latency was pretty noticeable. I also had problems changing video options, as any changes in that menu caused a crash.
This on a computer that could run WoW at 1920x1200 with all the details cranked up on Windows.
Sadly I now stick with Windows since I mostly just use my Desktop for gaming. Some day I might try Linux on my Desktop again but not anytime soon. It's just not worth the hassle of trying to get X and Wine tweaked the way I want it to find out the games I want to play don't work (more native ports please...)
On the other hand my Linux server is working great and I'm glad I don't use Windows on that box.
Wrong. There are some differences. There is some additional hardware that's enabled/disabled by the firmware and such. Consumer cards are typically ones where this special hardware doesn't work so it's disabled and sold at a cheaper price.
Intel does the same thing with their Processors and sell ones with broken cache as less expensive parts like their Celeron line. (AMD was doing this with quadcores to get those tri-cores awhile back.)
All ASIC companies do this on large chips or else they'd be throwing away too many chips to be profitable.
Did anyone catch what GPU/graphics card they used? The article mentions they used a Q6600 ($185) as their test CPU but it makes no mention of which GPU they ran with.
Did they run this on an 9800GT? 8800GT? 8600?
To make this a fair comparison they should be running the test on a system with a quadcore and the lowest end GPU for the CPU test. Then run the same comparison on a low end Intel CPU (same price as that low end GPU from above) and a GPU priced about the same as their Q6600.
This would fit better with comparing what NVIDIA's been claiming with their optimized PC campaign.
Umm, no. The volume on chipset sales isn't from individual's buying boards but from OEM sales. Intel is so widely used because they basically throw the chipset with integrated graphics in free when you buy their CPU's.
The profit Margin's on CPU's are something like 500% and the chipsets sell at cost or below cost to help motivate CPU sales.
Considering the vast majority of PC's sold are to businesses that don't need anything that couldn't have been done with a VGA controller from 1995 decent mainboard/graphics upgrades can be a hard sell to OEMs. Outside the basic Word/Internet explorer user as more apps use the GPU to accelerate operations (photoshop for example) perhaps you'll see more NVIDIA chipsets/graphics cards and less of Intel's barely functional junk.
I have the game and the only use of the CD key that came with it was to register at the game's website. By registering I have access to game patches and updates and that's about it. The updates don't even require anything special to download and could just be mirrored by anyone (I assume the license says no mirroring).
You're partially correct. For most user apps the kernel does reserve 1/2 GB of memory for itself leaving only about 2 GB for the user program to use. But this is in the "Virtual" address space for a single application.
If you look at the physical hardware layout if you're running in 32 bit mode you have a limit of 4GB of addressable physical memory. So if you stick in 4GB of system RAM and then a 512MB video card, that video card will alias over part of your physical memory. This means even the OS can't access the entire 4GB of RAM you stuck in your system.
If you are running a modern CPU in 64 bit mode on a 64 bit OS you are able to map 512MB to that graphics card and also access all of your 4GB of RAM. (Though even in 64 bit mode there's usually only 40 or 48 bits worth of address supported by the cpu).
Why else do you think you almost never see a system with more than 3GB of memory running a 32 bit OS?
---
I should point out that this is a simplification. The PCI address map in a PC has all sorts of crazy aliasing in the physical addresses due to devices not fully decoding address bits. This causes there to be holes scattered around the physical memory map that waste memory bits.
Also you can get to more than 4GB of memory in 32 bit mode using Intel's PAE mode, but that requires some app and os awareness.
Hey drsquare if you're interested in at least seeing some OTHER landscapes try to start (or walk your character) to any of the following places.
Horde: Make a Tauren or visit thunder bluff here you start in a grasslands area with an American Indian motif on the buildings. Think American Midwest pre corn.
Make an undead. You start in a forested area that's been corrupted by plague, sort of green but dark and spooky.
Make a blood elf. You start in a combination of a corrupted area and shiny forestland. You have some really interesting elf buildings to check out.
Go Alliance.
Create a dwarf/gnome and check out the snowscapes of outside Ironforge.
Make a human and see the forests of Elwynn.
Make a nightelf and start on the massive tree "island" of Teldrassil, a forest but a totally different style from Elwynn.
There are many more unique places to visit but nothing safe until you've leveled up. I think the Alliance side has the biggest variation in landscape leveling up (Lots of horde see durotar then the barrens both of which are brown/orange city).
Once you get beyond 10-20 you'll start to see a lot of the variation in the world, the deserts of Tanaris, the wasteland in Desolace, the spooky forests of the Darkshire area, the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale and more.
I know I'm just feeding a troll, but I think you need to take a closer look.
It takes maybe an hour or two to hit level 6 in WoW. At this point you haven't been introduced to more than couple skills, and talent points don't even become available until level 10!
Blizzard purposefully slowly introduces you to all your skills so new players are not overwhelmed. Once you hit around level 20 you have most (but not all) of your class defining skills and gameplay is much more active than just watching some text scroll by.
What class are you playing? Everyone seems to say you just click on a guy and watch yourself autoattack but that's not the way most classes should be working.
Rogues should be using up those engergy points building combos and doing finishing moves, mages/locks/priests/druids have to actively cast spells etc. Perhaps you only tried out a warrior which is pretty slow early on.
As for the boring brown you must have started in durotar on the horde side. That is sort of a a drab boring brown, but as you move around you'll find the different areas are all quite different. On the side you started with Durotar/The Barrens are a bit drab, but if you go visit the undead you'll their starting zone looks completely different. Or go start a blood elf and check out Silvermoon. You'll soon see that the various landscapes in WoW are fairly different.
Most hardware soundcards also have sound buffers in system memory. I believe Creative's do as well unless something very explicitly uses their XRAM feature. The only game I know of that did so was one of the Battlefield games.
The processing/memory overhead is nothing if one has a modern dual/quad core with 2-4 GB of main memory. Most games aren't properly multithreaded anyway so it's not like you're stealing their CPU cycles.
The big difference between onboard/real sound has to do with the ADC/DACs and connectivity. For most people the onboard stuff is probably fine unless you have a really noisy mainboard, and if your onboard is doing DDL or some other digital output even that doesn't matter.
Of course for non-gaming situations such as pro-audio capture/editing there are other issues that make a dedicated card worth it. But you wouldn't buy yourself an x-fi gaming card for that.
Slashdot Mirror
An Ion is about as small a standard form factor as you can get (pico-itx).
Once you look at the Ion for an HDTV platform, I don't think you'd go back looking at Intel's offering...
That's the way to go in the future. The ION is the NVIDIA 9400M chipset (used by Apple in their laptops) but paired with an low wattage Intel Atom CPU. The entire thing is designed around a tiny pico-itx board, and draws very little power and can be passively cooled.
But due to the use of the NVIDIA ION chipset the package can decode HD video and run Vista Premium (if you wanted to) something you can't do on Intel's stock platform of Atom + 945G for a chipset.
If all AMD wanted was the low end business market they could have passed on ATI, and just licensed a cheapo core from someone like SiS, or they could have even acquired S3.
They probably wanted some of the chipset design expertise of the ATI side to create a "Centrino" like platform. That and they thought that the CPU will want to incorporate some of the parallel features of the GPU (Google their Fusion CPU project).
I didn't say integrated graphics was bad. I was saying INTEL's graphics are bad.
Go check out the 790G chipsets from AMD and the 9300/9400 chipsets from NVIDIA.
Both are integrated mainboards, but have much better 3D and HD decoding than what's offered by Intel, even in Linux. These will work for you in an low profile home theater PC, and do a better job of it :).
Yea, and then ask more clued up friends why a game they just got runs like crap. Just because they don't care does not mean they don't use it.
That's exactly what I was getting at. I have friends who aren't die hard gamers who have no idea what a GPU is. But they still like to play games occasionally.
They go out and buy games like The Sims 2, Spore, or even World of Warcraft (yeah casual people play this) and get frustrated that it runs so poorly.
I hate to tell them that because they have a low end Intel integrated chip they're just screwed (especially friends with laptops where an upgrade is unheard of). Heck even the lowest end NVIDIA or ATI INTEGRATED chip is over 10 times faster than Intel, and honestly costs only a couple $ more.
Sure the NVIDIA/ATI integrated GPUs aren't top of the line, but at least with those the game is playable. I know someone who was trying to play some games on their Intel chipset and textures and some other affects are just missing.
True that people aren't looking for to play Crysis, but simple programs like Spore, and even Google Earth benefit from going to an NVIDIA or ATI integrated GPU. There's a visual quality upgrade on even these "casual" games as the Intel chips do such a poor job.
Also both the ATI and NVIDIA integrated chipsets do a better job of decoding HD video with less CPU usage. (Check out reviews of the ATI 790G and NVIDIA 9400M chipsets if you don't believe me.)
Plus with OpenCL we might start to see more regular applications accelerated on the GPU. Photoshop is accelerated when working with images, and both NVIDIA/ATI have programs which use the GPU to transcode video which people can use on their iPods, or share with family over the 'net.
I'm sure Apple has some cool ideas on how to use the GPU since they're heavily investing in OpenCL for Snow Leopard. That's probably partly why they went all NVIDIA on their notebook line.
If you're looking for accelerated MPEG4 and HD video playback you won't find that on the Intel board. While they support XvMC fairly well that only does MPEG2.
Last month they released some drivers for the VA-API but that's in their closed source binary blob driver which works very poorly on Linux.
NVIDIA has VDPAU support which will already allow you to play back HD streams without having to fork over for a more expensive, and hotter running CPU.
Phoronix has several Articles about this:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_vdpau_vaapi&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_vdpau&num=1
CPUs won't be going away, instead they're becoming less important and more of a commodity part. Which is what Intel is terrified of. Plus you'll still need something to run the OS and handle some IO while the GPU is crunching numbers.
Plus while the CPU might be dying (if you believe NVIDIA) we're not to the point you don't need one. Intel is the big player and if you want to ship products you need a platform to talk with the CPU.
Intel wants to throw hurdles in the way and delay NVIDIA until they launch their own GPU. If they didn't think this was where the market was going they probably wouldn't be spending so much effort on Larrabee.
Define sell. If you mean bundle for virtually free with CPU's (or in some cases cheaper than just a CPU, go Monopoly) then yes they do.
If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.
In fact they count sales of chipsets with integrated graphics as a graphics sale for market share even if that computer also has a discrete graphics card. So if you buy something with an NVIDIA or ATI card and a 945G chipset that counts as graphics sale for Intel even though the graphics chip is never used.
Their integrated graphics actually benchmarks slower than Microsoft's Software DirectX10 implementation (running on a Core i7). If people were more aware of just how poorly Intel integrated chips were they'd probably sell even less.
Sadly, most people aren't aware of the vast difference in performance, and just assume their computer is slow when Aero, The Sims, Spore or Google Earth run poorly.
Until Intel ships Larrabee we won't really know if they can ship a GPU, and that looks to be still over a year away.
You still fail. They aren't getting rid of the Mac client.
They expected the number of users of the Linux and Mac clients to grow. The mac user base has grown, but the Linux user base appears to have stagnated.
I like Blizzard but that's not how it works. You download and install the game before playing.
Turbine Games actually pioneered with Asheron's Call. Most of the patches were rather small and you got texture and map updates as you ran around the world. They did this since at the time everyone had dial-up and wanted to save people downloading stuff they didn't need.
You don't see multi-core GPU's 'cause there's no point. The GPU design is nothing like a CPU.
The GPU is already a collection of parallel cores, often called "shaders" (though NVIDIA and AMD are now branding them cores). These are what actually do the work. You can keep cramming more shaders into the chip and keep getting better performance, but at some point the chip gets too big to actually manufacture.
So basically there's no point of taking two GPU cores as they stand now and shrinking them together. You'd just end up with a less efficient design.
Of course the dual-GPU cards have some issues since you now have to distribute work between two different processors, yet they are hidden from the software stack so the dev only sees a single GPU. In this case you have a bunch of classic NUMA programming problems, but the software/game dev often doesn't take this into account. The drivers devs do their best to work around bottlenecks but they can only do so much.
This is often why some games can scale very well with SLI/Crossfire and others see no benefit. Those that see the biggest performance boosts avoid features/algorithms that don't scale well when adding multiple GPUs.
I wish they announced this before I got it for the PS3. I want to support DRM games and so far PoP seems like it might be fairly good.
My only problem is that it looks like it's designed as a console game and may play better on my PS3. So I worry PC sales will be weak compared to console and they'll blame piracy.
Last thing I want is Ubisoft to pick up with restrictive DRM again. I won't buy anything DRMed from them again since I got Spliter Cell: Chaos Theory and NEVER was able to play it. It's captacular Starforce protection never supported 64 bit Windows.
Little of each. Apple is really picky about picking hardware which correctly supports features such as power states. They also test with the hardware to make sure OS X works well with what they've chosen.
With Windows/Linux it's sort of a potluck grab bag, and you're at the mercy of a thousands of different vendors/driver writers to get something right.
Some OEMs might spend more time picking hardware with better support. But as the standard Windows computer competes on price, corner cutting is rampant.
I guess WoW runs "JUST FINE" on Linux, but it doesn't run WELL.
Last time I tried to get WoW working in Linux (about a year ago) it was a PITA to install and patch. And even once I got it running and the proper tweaks setup to fix a couple OpenGL problems I still couldn't get the game to play sound properly. It either started to stutter, or required a huge buffer such that sound latency was pretty noticeable. I also had problems changing video options, as any changes in that menu caused a crash.
This on a computer that could run WoW at 1920x1200 with all the details cranked up on Windows.
Sadly I now stick with Windows since I mostly just use my Desktop for gaming. Some day I might try Linux on my Desktop again but not anytime soon. It's just not worth the hassle of trying to get X and Wine tweaked the way I want it to find out the games I want to play don't work (more native ports please...)
On the other hand my Linux server is working great and I'm glad I don't use Windows on that box.
You mean HDMI. HDCP (High definition content protection) is supported over HDMI, DVI, and Display port.
Macs DO use HDCP and will prevent playback of some itunes content on non compliant monitors.
See: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/18/apples_new_macbooks_have_built_in_copy_protection_measures.html
Wrong. There are some differences. There is some additional hardware that's enabled/disabled by the firmware and such. Consumer cards are typically ones where this special hardware doesn't work so it's disabled and sold at a cheaper price.
Intel does the same thing with their Processors and sell ones with broken cache as less expensive parts like their Celeron line. (AMD was doing this with quadcores to get those tri-cores awhile back.)
All ASIC companies do this on large chips or else they'd be throwing away too many chips to be profitable.
Did anyone catch what GPU/graphics card they used? The article mentions they used a Q6600 ($185) as their test CPU but it makes no mention of which GPU they ran with.
Did they run this on an 9800GT? 8800GT? 8600?
To make this a fair comparison they should be running the test on a system with a quadcore and the lowest end GPU for the CPU test. Then run the same comparison on a low end Intel CPU (same price as that low end GPU from above) and a GPU priced about the same as their Q6600.
This would fit better with comparing what NVIDIA's been claiming with their optimized PC campaign.
Umm, no. The volume on chipset sales isn't from individual's buying boards but from OEM sales. Intel is so widely used because they basically throw the chipset with integrated graphics in free when you buy their CPU's.
The profit Margin's on CPU's are something like 500% and the chipsets sell at cost or below cost to help motivate CPU sales.
Considering the vast majority of PC's sold are to businesses that don't need anything that couldn't have been done with a VGA controller from 1995 decent mainboard/graphics upgrades can be a hard sell to OEMs. Outside the basic Word/Internet explorer user as more apps use the GPU to accelerate operations (photoshop for example) perhaps you'll see more NVIDIA chipsets/graphics cards and less of Intel's barely functional junk.
Actually, Sins has no copy protection.
I have the game and the only use of the CD key that came with it was to register at the game's website. By registering I have access to game patches and updates and that's about it. The updates don't even require anything special to download and could just be mirrored by anyone (I assume the license says no mirroring).
You're partially correct. For most user apps the kernel does reserve 1/2 GB of memory for itself leaving only about 2 GB for the user program to use. But this is in the "Virtual" address space for a single application.
If you look at the physical hardware layout if you're running in 32 bit mode you have a limit of 4GB of addressable physical memory. So if you stick in 4GB of system RAM and then a 512MB video card, that video card will alias over part of your physical memory. This means even the OS can't access the entire 4GB of RAM you stuck in your system.
If you are running a modern CPU in 64 bit mode on a 64 bit OS you are able to map 512MB to that graphics card and also access all of your 4GB of RAM. (Though even in 64 bit mode there's usually only 40 or 48 bits worth of address supported by the cpu).
Why else do you think you almost never see a system with more than 3GB of memory running a 32 bit OS?
---
I should point out that this is a simplification. The PCI address map in a PC has all sorts of crazy aliasing in the physical addresses due to devices not fully decoding address bits. This causes there to be holes scattered around the physical memory map that waste memory bits.
Also you can get to more than 4GB of memory in 32 bit mode using Intel's PAE mode, but that requires some app and os awareness.
But Oblivion was also released on PC/PS3 and looks better on both of those.
Hey drsquare if you're interested in at least seeing some OTHER landscapes try to start (or walk your character) to any of the following places.
Horde: Make a Tauren or visit thunder bluff here you start in a grasslands area with an American Indian motif on the buildings. Think American Midwest pre corn.
Make an undead. You start in a forested area that's been corrupted by plague, sort of green but dark and spooky.
Make a blood elf. You start in a combination of a corrupted area and shiny forestland. You have some really interesting elf buildings to check out.
Go Alliance.
Create a dwarf/gnome and check out the snowscapes of outside Ironforge.
Make a human and see the forests of Elwynn.
Make a nightelf and start on the massive tree "island" of Teldrassil, a forest but a totally different style from Elwynn.
There are many more unique places to visit but nothing safe until you've leveled up. I think the Alliance side has the biggest variation in landscape leveling up (Lots of horde see durotar then the barrens both of which are brown/orange city).
Once you get beyond 10-20 you'll start to see a lot of the variation in the world, the deserts of Tanaris, the wasteland in Desolace, the spooky forests of the Darkshire area, the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale and more.
I know I'm just feeding a troll, but I think you need to take a closer look.
It takes maybe an hour or two to hit level 6 in WoW. At this point you haven't been introduced to more than couple skills, and talent points don't even become available until level 10!
Blizzard purposefully slowly introduces you to all your skills so new players are not overwhelmed. Once you hit around level 20 you have most (but not all) of your class defining skills and gameplay is much more active than just watching some text scroll by.
What class are you playing? Everyone seems to say you just click on a guy and watch yourself autoattack but that's not the way most classes should be working.
Rogues should be using up those engergy points building combos and doing finishing moves, mages/locks/priests/druids have to actively cast spells etc. Perhaps you only tried out a warrior which is pretty slow early on.
As for the boring brown you must have started in durotar on the horde side. That is sort of a a drab boring brown, but as you move around you'll find the different areas are all quite different. On the side you started with Durotar/The Barrens are a bit drab, but if you go visit the undead you'll their starting zone looks completely different. Or go start a blood elf and check out Silvermoon. You'll soon see that the various landscapes in WoW are fairly different.
Most hardware soundcards also have sound buffers in system memory. I believe Creative's do as well unless something very explicitly uses their XRAM feature. The only game I know of that did so was one of the Battlefield games.
The processing/memory overhead is nothing if one has a modern dual/quad core with 2-4 GB of main memory. Most games aren't properly multithreaded anyway so it's not like you're stealing their CPU cycles.
The big difference between onboard/real sound has to do with the ADC/DACs and connectivity. For most people the onboard stuff is probably fine unless you have a really noisy mainboard, and if your onboard is doing DDL or some other digital output even that doesn't matter.
Of course for non-gaming situations such as pro-audio capture/editing there are other issues that make a dedicated card worth it. But you wouldn't buy yourself an x-fi gaming card for that.
They already just send out a form in most cases. The problem is that people don't return them so they have to go door to door to fill in the gaps.