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How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway?How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway?Posted Feb 1, 2008 14:16 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? by rankincj Parent article: Intel releases graphics programming manuals
The documentation is for Intel IGP video cards found in the majority of newer laptops and desktops. Intel produces the majority of desktop-oriented video devices. It's a normal chipset on-board memory-sharing video chipset. The equivelent for Nvidia or ATI would be whatever they have integrated into their motherboards. For raw performance pretty much everything ATI and Nvidia have outperforms the Intel stuff. The advantages of Intel are open drivers and very good power management. I would not buy a laptop without one. In terms of performance these video cards can be used very easily to run Compiz-fusion and perform well up to about 'Return to Castle Wolfenstien' levels. You can probably get Doom3 to run on one in Linux, but it would not be any fun to play. They are essentially crippled by the shared memory scheme. If Intel provided the same chipsets with dedicated video ram then their performance would be on par with the lower end side of Nvidia/ATI's offerings. But if you want 3D desktop and have good power management performance then Intel is what you'd generally want.
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How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? Posted Feb 1, 2008 17:13 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link] Shared memory isn't necessarily a bottleneck with appropriate RAM. SGI graphics workstations used the scheme. Among other things, video input could be written directly into texture memory, if I recall correctly. Though it did help that they used dual-ported memory....
How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? Posted Feb 1, 2008 17:34 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] What I would personally like to see is the GPU integrated as a specialized CPU core into the main proccessor and 512MB-1GB of very high speed ram integrated very close to that. I think the high-bandwidth and low-latency memory that is typically spent on video cards would go a lot better next to the CPU rather then sitting on the far end of a PCIE bus. Like a 'Level 3 cache' or something like that, then have cheaper main memory in it's normal position. I think ultimately discrete video cards are going to die off, except as just I/O ports for video connections. With 16+ cores avialable in desktop PCs in a few years it's not going to make a lot of sense to have them all be the same type of core. Oh Well with what is currently being used with this Intel onboard the main memory is shared over PCIe and utimately it takes away bandwidth from the CPU in order to refresh the video display. Having dual channel, low-latency memory can help, but that only goes so far.
How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? Posted Feb 1, 2008 19:05 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link] What I would personally like to see is the GPU integrated as a specialized CPU core into the main proccessor and 512MB-1GB of very high speed ram integrated very close to that.I believe you just described both Intel's and AMD's plans for mid next year. I know for sure AMD has that on the roadmap, and I'm sure Intel does as well. The only thing I would say is likely different is that it's not going to be a single GPU core, AMD calls them XPU's and they'll apparently be processing units that are highly specialized to do the work that is typically done with graphics. The roadmap concept graphics actually show as many xPU's as there are CPU cores on the AMD side. I imagine these xPU's will more than likely replace the floating point pipelines in the CPU.
How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? Posted Feb 1, 2008 23:48 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Ya, I am told that If you look at the current generation of GPUs on the market they are made up of a many 'cores'. Graphics proccessing is something that naturally lends itself to highly parrellel programming so it wouldn't suprise me if that was entirely true.
How capable are these graphics chipsets anyway? Posted Feb 2, 2008 8:48 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] It will be very handy for lower-end PCs and mobile devices to have the GPU and CPU on a single chip, with a smarter memory hierarchy. I don't claim to understand all this but I believe the only thing stopping such integration is that CPUs are on a 12-18 month cycle time and GPUs on about 6 months, so it may be that the integrated GPU-CPU combination will evolve at CPU rates, i.e. taking a snapshot of the latest GPU technology and delivering in 12-18 month cycles. There's also a commercial issue in that gamers buy a new graphics card every year or so - non-integrated graphics will survive a long time in that market, until the rate of GPU speed increases slows down quite a bit.
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