- Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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How many Bloody Marys have you had? - Richard Faria, Temonmichi
Intel caught in graphics shocker
IF YOU ARE not already sitting down, do so now, because this news is not for the weak or easily scared. That said, the new graphics in Intel's upcoming CPUs are not going to suck.
You may be familiar with the Intel integrated graphics saga, a tale of woe and dread rivaling a romance novel with the last few pages cut out. It all started with the G965, a chip that basically never worked right. Its successor, the G35, also never worked right, and the G45... well, to be charitable, came much closer to working. It was never considered fast, or even anything more than barely usable for office work, but it wasn't totally embarrassing. The current score, zero for three.
So, how many tries does it take for Intel to get graphics right? Four. No, really, I am not joking. The word from early testing is that Intel's integrated graphics - essentially a G55 integrated into the CPU package, not the chipset - are not going to suck this time around. They not only got it right, but gave it the horsepower to, well, stand proudly above those that don't offer bare minimum functionality.
The open question now is not raw horsepower, but drivers. Intel has been saying the drivers would function right for three-plus years now, but it never quite hit the mark. Given the sustained effort it is putting in, they just might get there. The lack of major architectural changes to the GPU also is a potential positive.
In the end, after three or four years of graphics that would not cut it on demanding games like The Sims, Intel may be stepping out of the dark. Its graphics will never run Crysis at full speed, but this time, I am hopeful that they will work, and do so at acceptable speeds. Believe it or not, this is real progress. µ
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You forgot to (or was it intentional hmm?) mention the older IGPs. Granted, the are obsolete but, many, many, many old Dells and whatnot are still floating around with Intels' "Extreme"* IGPs. These make the G965 graphics core look like a supercharged C6-LS9 Corvette! Then you have the GMA900/950. Bleh. Like anyone wants to play anything at 640x480 anymore.
*for the record, I've seen WoW run on iEx1-IGP at aprox 5FPS and somehow she claimed the game ran good enough. I have since educated her.
that was a total and utter disaster too. I mean it's so bad it's unsupported by Aero on Vista, even with a fast Core2 Duo pushing it.
Charlie has been always biased towards Intel. Perhaps he's Intel's dog against nvidia.
It will suck because it is integrated, simple as that.
Got any proof of that Charlie?
They just have to be good enough and that my friend should scare the hell of the green goblin!
not wonder about whether Intel gets drivers "right" or not. The only Intel part that had good gaming 3d (at the time) was the i740, and it wasn't even designed by Intel.
Intel is a disaster as a graphics company, which doesn't bother me. As long as they continue to release great CPU's and rock solid motherboards for business applications (with 3 year warranties or better!) I'll be happy.
When you said "of graphics that would not cut it on demanding games like The Sims" I think you meant "demanding games like Pong".
How much money does Charlie make from Intel? Please bring some decency to the journalism that it deserves and please refrain from such childish postings.
Its April Fools day all over again!
What's your problem? I have a MacBook and MSI Wind, both with Intel integrated graphics, and they both work great with all of OS X's effects, etc. They may be crap at playing video games, but since I don't play video games I don't care. Actually I bet most people don't play video games and would also be perfectly satisfied with Intel integrated graphics.
After Apple went nVidia 9400M instead of montevina, maybe it shook the Intel integrated graphics tree. Yes Intel, the GPU is an essential part of the PC, ever since you started creating integrated graphics they've been hobbled and you've been trying to offload graphics work to the CPU. Well guess what the tables are turned now, and OpenCL is going to start offloading CPU work to the GPU, wise up and realize you want to be that GPU and CPU, sell more kit and make more money.
I miss my i740 with 8mg of ram.. sigh those where there days.
And back then it was a great little dam card ;)
*stands proudly*
http://i43.tinypic.com/w9fiib.jpg
no ati investigation? where is your microscope?
Yes, Charlie, according to Mercury research.
Growing from 63% they had before.
You skipped on that one eh, Charlie?
What a journalist....
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/04/30/nvidia-increases-market-share/1
This is the source. Not so vague as Charlie's.
There you Charlie, all your efforts are vain...
nVidia sells twice as Ati on discrete boards.
Wow. Bit-tech.
Its obviously written in stone on large tablets then.
I, for one, am happy that the IGP's will finally be able to do more than just display the desktop, and movies.
I should know, as Vista x64 is running rather nicely on a Thinkpad X61. Windows 7 is fine too and the updated drivers (almost) make Morrowind playable.
The problem is not that it's *completely* crap - it's that performance is unpredictable. The number of shaders is, AIUI, very low. Some modern games that don't use too many resources work very well, whilst others do not.
Still, it's not really a problem at least for me. The X61 is a very portable notebook with great battery life - it is not designed to be a games machine..
As a developer who uses WPF I can say that intel IGPs are buggy as hell. I spent weeks trying to figure out why the current app I was making was always crashing or suddenly becoming so slow that it would take 10 minutes to get through something that should take 2 seconds. I eventually tested the app on some computers that have discrete graphic cards from both ATI and Nvidia and they worked perfectly. There is definitely some whacky things happening in those Intel IGPs.
BTW the app I am designing is a business app that has some light 3D graphics and shouldn't be a strain at all on a somewhat modern day computer.
massively goood news for any future intel atom platform...if intel nail IGP down, then we could hope for a better atom chipset later
The biggest problem with the drivers was missing or incomplete hardware to cope with the DirectX level of today. The lack of transistors means it can't do what was promised and it either fails to run or runs very slow because the CPU/driver is doing more work. I suspect the gulf between integrated and top-of-the-range discrete has increased over time.
GMA950 is the lowest end Intel IGP that works with Aero. It actually works quite well and not choppy at all.
Get your facts right.
I agree with Tom and Raa Yee, the majority of PC users want graphics that can run their OS and let the watch some streaming videos, family photos and web graphics.
"I agree with Tom and Raa Yee, the majority of PC users want graphics that can run their OS and let the watch some streaming videos, family photos and web graphics. "
An AMD k6-2 with a Tzeng labs PCI graphics card can do that. We're obviously not talking about displaying web graphics @go$#@mo#!#f@$#son^%^%@$#@sh#!$#fff!$ho#@!
(That's short for fellow computer graphics enthusiast.)
Weren't we supposed to be seeing the preliminary outing of Larrabee with the next "tick" platform offerings? If Intel has had problems with getting its old fashioned GPUs to function, what does this say about its abilities to deliver on something novel and ever so much more complex?
what are you trying to tell us? That nvidia fanboys are idiots for still buying the crap? That there are more idiots out there than smart buyers?
Newsflash:
we all know
Newsflash the second:
the few of us who didn't knew it, do knot it now thanks to you.
Nvidia fanboys are pathetic.
work very well, whilst others do not.
and stop including all the bloatware that isn't all that good.
Intel should stay with Processors and not worry about semi-working graphics. For office software and integrated graphics chip is more than enough. 30 extra dollars will get anyone a discreet graphics card that out performs any Intel solution.
I stupidly bought a G35 and then a G45 thinking Intel integrated graphics would be worth something.
What a waste of time. Good thing their Core 2's can do in software what the IGPs were supposed to do.
Charlie doesn't need to be biased here but still, it is a risk saying they might have produced something worth getting.
What is with the graphics division there?
at least they didnt buy our nvidia and slap them onto a cpu or integrated chipset... i guess if your going to suck you might as well be the one to blame... seriously they should just buy our nvidia, that way they could blame suck engineer... but i doubt they would want to pay the engineers to make a new product that's only an overclocked old one..... and ed6,, "and movies" what movie you play that doesn't chop.. youtube?... but seriously charlie. if you mean by wont suck, that the drivers will work and we wont have software emulation for 2 months, then ok. but really, intel has a way to go on there IGP end of the game. but that said.... only thing nvidia is for me is a cheap way to play games with physx enabled... 35 dollars. small card that my huge ati can look menacingly at for the forver.
I've been testing this since it came out with engineering samples and to tell you the truth, there are too many bugs in this GPU+CPU architecture. I got so many blue screens and system lock ups it's considered normal. Either way, the GPU+CPU architecture sucks for them, it didn't offer much improvement at all if any.