Meanwhile, don't use any gift certificates on anything Mobile that has the awful Intel video in it. Intel's chipset video chips have been produced in a wide variety lately, however, until about two, maybe three, years ago, all of them lacked several very basic functions that gaming CARDS] began featuring ten or twelve years ago, after nVIDIA's first "Riva" cards arrived on the scene, such as including a Textures and Lighting unit internally.
Even when the 3100X Chipset chip appeared, it took Intel eighteen months or so to activate all its functions in drivers. And] many of the producers of laptops in particular, have continued buying the older and less expensive chipset pair, so that brand new mobile computer devices still have the same stone age video (and the Atom has not been matched up to any recent Intel video chips, so Netbooks have remained in the same primitive state).
When the "i" series of Intel C2Ds began to appear, they had an upgraded version of the very latest chipset chip riding along piggyback inside the processor's packaging, where it shared some of the large RAM cache, and for the first time in all history, was competitive in raw speed with Chipset chips from real graphics engineers at AMD and nVIDIA. That does not mean the i-CPUs can be used for gaming without truly HUGE compromises, however, as is also true of the AMD and nVIDIA Chipset video chips.
With Sandy Bridge, most of the improvement has gone into the actual CPU side, where some 10-20% of added efficiency has been achieved. However, instead of merely being a separate device riding along, the video support in Sandy Bridge is supposed to have been fully intgrated into CPU functioning, giving it new advantages it didn't have while piggy-backing.
Again, this does *NOT* mean it is a game-capable option, unless the game settings are seriously crippled to allow it to be used. According Anand Tech's tests, it is as fast for some things as the Radeon HD 4200 / 4250 pair of Chipset video chips that formerly held the top rank among the onboard video crowd, and even matches AMD's least capable HD 5n00 real card (a poor card for certain), the 5450, on some benches.
The biggest news out of CES for game players is that Microsoft will support ARM, and that nVIDIA is building its own ARM processor, so it won't be left behind by AMD's Fusion (which blows past Sandy Bridge, with better battery life, less waste heat, and better video).
Gorath
Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 09 janvier 2011 - 04:41 .
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