Laptop Graphics and Intels Sandbridge

SCRUB

Howdy folks

Just trying to get a bit of information on laptop graphic cards. I was going to get a laptop over christmas and then read about the intel sand bridge that is coming out soon that had the cpu and gpu integrated onto the same core and coould set the market alight. This sounded really good, but how does it compare to current mobility cards ?

Also .. with the mobility mobility cards on labtops , are these ever upgradable ? or is it always integrated onto the labtop ?

Solitaire

AFAIK there's no such thing as a good Intel GPU Their GPUs are almost purely designed for 2D, and although they're equivalent to other low-end cards their lack of driver support cripples their 3D performance or prevents games from running on them outright. AFAIK the GPU on Sandy will just be a faster version of the one already on the Core-i CPUs (which already have the northbridge and GPU integrated) and the lack of driver support for 3D will kill its performance in games.

And yes, the vast majority of laptops have graphics integrated onto either the CPU or the northbridge. Of the rest - most of which are pricey high-end units - many have proprietary graphics cards and the rest use semi-standard MXM cards that, while upgradeable, are incredibly expensive and come in multiple hapes and sizes (mostly to prevent someone trying to stick a high-end card in a mid-range laptop as the smaller laptop could not handle the card's heat output or power draw).

Sgt Pepper 64

Solitaire wrote: »

AFAIK there's no such thing as a good Intel GPU Their GPUs are almost purely designed for 2D, and although they're equivalent to other low-end cards their lack of driver support cripples their 3D performance or prevents games from running on them outright. AFAIK the GPU on Sandy will just be a faster version of the one already on the Core-i CPUs (which already have the northbridge and GPU integrated) and the lack of driver support for 3D will kill its performance in games.

And yes, the vast majority of laptops have graphics integrated onto either the CPU or the northbridge. Of the rest - most of which are pricey high-end units - many have proprietary graphics cards and the rest use semi-standard MXM cards that, while upgradeable, are incredibly expensive and come in multiple hapes and sizes (mostly to prevent someone trying to stick a high-end card in a mid-range laptop as the smaller laptop could not handle the card's heat output or power draw).

Whilst nobody expects to get High End PC gaming from cheaper low end laptops, Sandybridge is expected to bring better gaming capabilitys to them. AMD also has its own solution on the way.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20016628-64.html

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/1

Solitaire

The catch is: outside those irksome benchmark titles, exactly how much driver support will Sandy have for gaming? nVidia's stats are often outrageously hiked by reviewers as they usually benchmark a disproportionate number of high-profile titles that nVidia went out of their way to provide driver support for (and often paid the devs to remove all CF optimisations for...) :rolleyes:

Outside the Source engine and a few other optimised titles I don't see Sandy working well at 1080p; many titles might even glitch or fail to run and the odds of driver support to fix that are very slim, unlike AMD and nVidia (the latter of whom already sucks at legacy support for both older games and older GPUs!). Then also bear in mind that mobile and budget parts will not have gaming-level GPUs in them; their GPUs will be simplified and run much slower. Same with Fusion. You can't have an integrated HD5770-level GPU and a lightweight CPU TDP...

lmimmfn

it will suck

SCRUB

Thanks a million Guys , even you lmimmfn !

Jonny7

I think AMD fusion is gonna be good for netbooks and ultraportables

Prices won't change but processing power will increase slightly, graphics a lot (from the current onboard) and battery time by a good margin

HP have an 11.6 inch coming out with fusion on Jan 9th, starting about 450 dollars - keep an eye out for the review and we'll see how the new platform performs

Asus 1215N - in its own little market niche
500 euro netbook that you can actually play crysis on, with full win 7 (no starter), 2 gig ram, fastest dualcore atom (1.8) and of course Ion2 for the graphics on 12 inch screen - great if sandy bridge and fusion turn out to be not so spectacular

Solitaire

The upper-netbook/lower-laptop Fusion CPU (Ontario or Zacate; can't remember which! ) will be pretty good, AFAIK it will be better than Atom+Ion :cool:

And how is the 1215N able to play Crysis? At 640*480 at 5fps? Its not really nVidia's wee 9400GS that's at fault; in-order CPU architecture just can't handle 3D gaming and even the newer version of HyperThreading going into the new Atom revision can't gloss over that. Again, the dual-core out-of-order Fusion CPUs will be much stronger in that regard.

Jonny7

Actually twenty something fps and counting! same with other much newer and more recent titles, and this is with bad architecture and worse drivers.. really looking forward to fusion.. not that I'll ever play games on a netbook, the nerd in me only wants the thing to be capable of it

Solitaire

IMHO a 10-12" subnotebook that could play older or less demanding games well at lowish res would be godly

In which case our hopes must rest upon whether AMD decide to cut down on the GPU in the mobile incarnations of Athlon 3 (Llano) or not. The desktop Athlon 3s will have HD5670s built into the CPU die itself... and possibly HD4830/9800GT level performance if they squeeze high GPU clocks out of them (Llano being a 32nm part)

Solitaire

Oh dear...

Apparently the new Intel GPU is about as good as a HD4550 running flat-out in its grandest incarnation... in the games explicitly supported by the drivers, something Intel aren't good at updating. And then there's the issue that most mobile versions are heavily underclocked, so they won't be anywhere near as good.

And the really funny part? With the desktop CPUs its even worse - almost all of them are only given a crippled version with half the power. So you're stuck buying a cheap graphics card anyway for low-medium-res light gaming. So which models got the fully-fledged, full-speed GPUs? The pricey K variants. Which you would hardly ever pair with integrated graphics anyway! But the real punchline is that in order to overclock the Ks (via their unlocked multi, which is the only reason you'd buy the K) you have to use a P67 mobo which does not support the onboard GPUs!!!

Way to faceplant Intel! :pac:

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

Oh dear...

Apparently the new Intel GPU is about as good as a HD4550 running flat-out in its grandest incarnation... in the games explicitly supported by the drivers, something Intel aren't good at updating. And then there's the issue that most mobile versions are heavily underclocked, so they won't be anywhere near as good.

And the really funny part? With the desktop CPUs its even worse - almost all of them are only given a crippled version with half the power. So you're stuck buying a cheap graphics card anyway for low-medium-res light gaming. So which models got the fully-fledged, full-speed GPUs? The pricey K variants. Which you would hardly ever pair with integrated graphics anyway! But the real punchline is that in order to overclock the Ks (via their unlocked multi, which is the only reason you'd buy the K) you have to use a P67 mobo which does not support the onboard GPUs!!!

Way to faceplant Intel! :pac:

Well i did say it would suck lol

The new deal between Intel and Nvidia allowing them to use each others patents should allow Intel to finally have a decent integrated gpu in a year or 2

Solitaire

Was that agreement active before their current-gen CPU? No recent Chrome results to compare them to but I find it fascinating how Intel graphics seem to get a huge boost over AMD in TWIWMTBP titles... almost like, instead of being optimised for nVidia cards, they had been DE-OPTIMISED just for AMD drivers... :rolleyes::cool: