The laptop usability situation only got worse, for YEARS
The original discussion I'd started with predated the influence of the "Netbook" class of computing devices diluting the gaming quality of the laptop / notebook offerings in the marketplace. The upper range of Netbooks was already close to an overlap in performance with the low-price mobile PCs, when the last major rewrite of this article was fresh, and many manufacturers were choosing to keep on using older, lower-priced chipsets in their laptops to keep their laptops' costs down.
Now, LOOK OUT FOR THE FUSION APUs coming soon
(More about those at the end of where the article had ended when I rewrote it.)
Netbooks' video devices have heretofore all strictly been onboard chips, and five or six months ago, almost all were using the outdated IGPs that Intel first offered about four years ago. Too many current laptops with Intel chipsets are still using the same old-model IGPs that those netbooks do, or cost reasons. Within the last three years, Intel had finally started to include most of the features and functions that ATI and nVIDIA had been including in IGPs for the past 8-10 years. Not that any of the IGPs from any of the three have truly been game-capable, just that it was possible to at least "preview" what a game might look like on such a chip, if it was from AMD or nVIDIA.
The influence of $200-300 Netbooks extends also to causing a reduction in the numbers of laptops that would have included an actual, discrete, video card instead of an onboard video chip, because that adds quite a bit to the cost of a laptop, and the average cost of those offered has been lowered generally. There are fewer laptops available for purchase that have real video cards in them. The top end of the smaller-sized laptops, the "notebook" models, are the ones being bypassed by the buyers of various "tablet" devices similar to the Apple iPad product.
Cost-cutting has also affected the cooling capacity of those laptops that really do have video cards, but now many more of them get hot too quickly because the heat sinks are too small, and the cooling fans are too ineffectual. Admittedly, there had already been a tendency on the part of laptop designers to shortchange the heat sink hardware, because it adds to the weight of the PC, and laptop designers are devoted to the gods of light weight and long battery life, both being elements heavily impacted by high performance add-on video cards.
The engineers at nVIDIA have been considering the Netbook and Smartphone devices as a better place for them to compete in than the general PC market, where AMD has a serious advantage in being able to integrate GPUs inside of the designs of their coming "Fusion" line of CPUs. Their influence, if they earn a sizable share of the video in those markets, can only be good. Almost anything other than what Intel is doing in video nearly has to be better.
That isn't to say that Intel has been going backward graphically, but their low standard has been legendary, and any improvement at all is noticed. Over the past year, many of their i3 / i5 video chip systems have been able to perform almost as well as the nVIDIA onboard graphics currently available, but right at this moment, the Geforce Mobile generation of Fermi GPUs is setting some amazing standards (although demanding better cooling than ever before).
AMD will soon be releasing Mobile versions of their "Fusion" series (Mid-May 2011), which should be extremely helpful to improving the laptop standards. Intel has a new processor family they call "Sandy Bridge" that was pushed out the door before it was fully cooked, trying to upstage AMD, then they had to have a callback, because they were faulty. Instead of merely being a separate video chip riding inside the CPU package, it will be at least basically integrated into their CPU, sharing the cache. It promises to be as fast as the current AMD onboard chip, the HD 4200, but AMD was supposed to have already have replaced that one before then (they haven't).
If all laptop makers adhered to the very same performance standards for add-on video, game developers would be more inclined to consider offering tech support to the laptop PCs, but each designer seems to have his (or her) own standards for what level of performance degradation he / she will will apply in the name of battery life or total weight. Compared to the ATI and nVIDIA reference designs, too few even follow the (typically 10 % reduction in performance compared to the matching desktop card version) recommended specifications. The end result is variations of 10% more performance loss, to as much as a total of 30% dilution.
The potential improvements remain just potential. Intel's laptop chipsets are cheap, familiar, and the average laptop buyer really doesn't care to pay extra for good video, so at least 95% of them have nothing better than an Intel video chip in them, making that 95% segment undesireable choices for game playing.
HERE is the Latest News about Fusion and Mobile Computing.
It is now May, 2011, and the new mobile Fusion APUs (were supposed to already be shipping) to Netbook, Notebook, and Laptop manufacturers, with the PCs using them expected a couple of months ago. The NetBook and NetTop Fusion APUs are the only ones in production so far.
Why is this pertinent here? Fusion is going to be available for standard laptops at a much smaller cost than discrete GPUs plus a CPU, and no one else is going to have anything for laptops that competes. Private ownership of PCs is concentrated in laptops, not desktops. Initially, the business grade, like an HD 5450, will probably be priced at almost what similar AMD processors without graphics have cost. That will really put a dent, potentially, in nVIDIA's sales of chipsets for AMD processors, and for cheap discrete cards like the G.205, G.210, and G.410 Geforces.
Although pricing isn't being discussed yet, the presumption is that the difference between an APU with business graphics, and one with the equivilant of the HD 5570 graphics integrated will be relatively small compared to a card, probably less than $10 to the OEMs, translating to maybe $15 retail (my guess there).
THOSE APUs will run games such as DAO without any separate GPU card, which is why it's significant to this article.
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Gorath
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Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 05 mai 2011 - 05:11 .
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