The laptop usability situation only got worse, for YEARS
The original discussion here 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.
Warning: change any seasonal gift purchase plans. "Fusion" is almost here (see the end of the article).
Netbooks' video devices have heretofore all strictly ben onboard chips, and five or six months ago, almost all were using the outdated IGPs that Intel first offered about five years ago. Too many current laptops with Intel chipsets are still using the same old-model IGPs that those netbooks do. 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.
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 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 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 (2nd Q 2011), which should be extremely helpful to improving the laptop standards. Intel has a new processor family they call "Sandy Bridge" in the wings, due out about the same time, or slightly after, the release of the AMD Fusion. Instead of merely being a separate video chip riding inside the CPU package, it will be at least basically itegrated into their CPU, sharing the cache. It promises to be as fast as the current AMD onboard chip, the HD 4200, but AMD will already have replaced that one before then.
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.
Wait until after New Year's before buying any mobile computing product with compromised video. The Fusion APU is almost here.
Intel's Sandy Bridge is due this coming April or May, when the same basic low quality Intel video now riding along piggy back inside the processor package of the i3, i5, and i7, is entirely integrated in the next series of CPUs. But "Fusion" is practically already here.
The AMD device combines a far more capable graphics capability, closely related to the Radeon HD 5n00 generation as an integrated function to their multi-core CPU, and the mobile versions are already in the (figurative) hands of Netbook, Notebook, and laptop manufacturers, with the PCs using them expected about the turn of the year or even sooner. The desktop Fusion APUs are expected in February.
The latest news on a long-standing feud between Intel and nVIDIA over whether nVIDIA's contract with Intel included the right to design chipsets for the newer Intel CPUs was about to go into court, after six years of wrangling (when Core Duo was a mere embryo). But both agreed to ask for a continuance because they were back in negotiations now.
The conjecture going around is that Intel wants to protect its dominant lock on the Netbook market, which the Fusion threatens, given its many times superior graphics. nVIDIA's ION is a low-current device that offers almost-competitive graphics performance to the Fusion for games, and superior performance in some other areas. Intel may hope to save a bigger part of their Netbook market if they can pair up ION and Atom at a good price, which right now, they cannot.
Why is this pertinent here? Fusion is going to be available for standard laptops at a much smaller cost that 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 discrete cards like the G.210 Geforce.
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 $15 to the OEMs, translating to maybe $25 retail (my guess there).
THOSE APUs will run games such as ME2 without any separate GPU card, which is why it's significant to this article.
Gorath
Gorath
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Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 05 novembre 2011 - 05:04 .
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