LOL at people praising AMD's driver team when you have threads here with people complaining about issues with the HD 7000 series.
You do realize in the Anandtech review they did not mention having any issues with the drivers, right?
And you do realize the GMA 950 is a 6-year-old IGP, right? If we were to make arguments here making reference to issues with 6-year-old products everyone here would be complaining about the horrible driver support for the Radeon HD 2000 and 3000 series and how that means AMD has horrible driver support.
I even said that no one will be putting an 35W CPU into ultrabooks but you went and strawmanned anyways. I was pointing out that the comparison to the i5-2410m wasn't apples to apples. That said, you linked to the normalized chart in a later post I guess.
Really, because I have three AMD GPU's, never had a driver problem with any of them. Sure, the 7 series has some problems. It's new. It will be sorted out.
You do realize that while they don't mention any issues with drivers, they don't mention which ones they use?
Do you realize his point was that he was just making the point that he hasn't had any direct experience with these drivers in a while, not basing his opinion on the support then, but on what has been said of recent drivers.
I haven't had any problems with the drivers on my laptop which has an HD 3000, but then again, I'm part of the 90%+ that doesn't game on their laptops. ()
The Anandtech review didn't mention having any issues with the drivers from what I could see, and it's funny how people say the HD 7000 series is new and therefore the small issues with the drivers will be fixed yet I've seen no one mention any issues with the HD 4000's drivers even though it's even newer.
Obviously, a 17W chip would get better relative battery life, because it has a whole 18W of TDP less to use.
Interesting that while the A10 had more than 100% more TDP available than the ULV IVB chip, but its relative battery life was only no where near 100% worse.
I know that is not how TDP is quantified, but you get my point.
Both companies also release drivers far more frequently and you can also download crossfire/SLi profiles before they make it to the official drivers. Intel doesn't offer dual graphics but even if they did it would suck The biggest issue AMD has with mobile drivers is that they're controlled by OEMs, or more specifically they were and we're not sure about Trinity. This meant that people with Llanos had to rely on Lenovo/HP/Asus, etc. for their drivers and had to hope the companies weren't lazy in uploading the AMD official drivers to their site. If things change with Trinity then you can expect better and more frequent drivers and thus better performance than we had with Llano. If drivers are still a locked-in deal then AMD and their friends screwed the pooch yet again. Even still with locked-in drivers AMD has way better drivers than Intel provides.
TDP doesn't mean much when it comes to actual power consumption. Both the 2500K/2600K are 95W TDP yet they consume significantly less power than the 95W FX-6100. Rather, it's a number that is used throughout a whole line of products to indicate the minimum amount of power the OEM cooling solution needs to be able to dissipate.
The A6-4455M won't consume half the power of the A10-4600M, either.
I also haven't seen much of anyone that has a laptop with an HD 4000 yet. And even then, people who game on their laptops don't buy laptops with just Intel IGP's, so your probobly not going to see many people who do complain. But those that will will have legitimate things to coplain about, like crappy image quality, something absent on AMD solutions.
No, you are correct, they did not mention any driver problems. But they didn't mention driver problems with the AMD system either, so your argument is invalid.
Image quality is actually quite good, although there are a few areas where Intel falls behind the competition. I don't believe Ivy Bridge's GPU performance is high enough yet where we can start nitpicking image quality but Intel isn't too far away from being there.
Anisotropic filtering quality is much improved compared to Sandy Bridge. There's a low precision issue in DirectX 9 currently which results in the imperfect image above, that has already been fixed in a later driver revision awaiting validation. The issue also doesn't exist under DX10/DX11.
Game compatibility is also quite good, not perfect but still on the right path for Intel. It's also worth noting that Intel has been extremely responsive in finding and eliminating bugs whenever we pointed at them in their drivers.
I'm not finding this driver and image quality "issue" many people are talking about.
I realize that, and you are correct in that regard. My point still has some value, in that there should still be more of a 22% difference in relative battery from a 17W to 35W. Of course, we won't know for sure until we have numbers on a 17W Trinity.
Reread that again. They were comparing HD3000 vs HD4000, so hardware and not driver updates. They also reached the conclusion that though it's improved tremendously, it still lags behind AMD's IQ and tesselation. Intel's working on their drivers but they still have a lot of room for improvement if they wish to considered on the same level as AMD/nV.
Yeah, no... they were talking about the drivers.
Game Image Quality
For most gamers, image quality is an important consideration, and Intel has a bad reputation for delivering less-than-stellar visuals—particularly poor anisotropic filtering. Although SemiAccurate reports that the situation is much improved on Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge still suffers from terrible filtering quality.
In a nutshell, we want the color patterns to map consistently to the geometry (so, in this case, we want them to be perfectly circular), and we want the transitions between each color to be smooth. Trinity's Radeon HD 7760G integrated graphics has no trouble with either task. Ivy Bridge's HD 4000 IGP also manages mostly circular patterns with smooth transitions, but if you look closely, you'll see jagged lines where the red fades into the background checkerboard pattern. As for Sandy Bridge, well, the image speaks for itself.
In a real-world example, the differences are plainly visible. Trinity and Ivy Bridge both give us nice, sharp textures at off-axis angles of inclination, while Sandy Bridge fails in a very noticeable way.
Or is Trinity now suddenly an Enthusiast solution and that's why you need the best IQ instead of good IQ, which according to the review is what the HD 4000 delivers? Do clarify, because perhaps I foolishly thought that it would be people looking at discrete graphics solutions like GT 650M and up that would care about having the best image quality rather than "good enough". I thought AMD's target with Llano and Trinity was "good enough" budget gaming, so perhaps you should explain why a person buying a $500-600 laptop to do some gaming would care about the very best image quality when he's playing at Medium settings and is playing casually.
On the other hand Rory Read claims that North America performed very well, when in fact any reputable market research outfit reports similarly bleak numbers. The truth of the matter is that for a considerable amount of people computing got a commodity in the developed Western countries, which prolonged upgrade cycles. The old machines are simply good enough as long as they don't break. As usual, anyone playing demanding games or doing serious business on their PCs is an exception to this rule.
Take your E420 and fire up any game, really. The few I've playerd on my HD3000 all have crappy image quality, especially Skyrim, which barely runs anyways. The image quality may be improved over the HD 4000, but I've not seen anyone complain about image quality with AMD, other than RAGE.
And people buying K series CPU's almost NEVER use the IGP. Sure, it's available in quad core CPU's in laptops. Find me one person on the forum with a HD 4000 laptop on the forums.
Honestly, the only thing that Intel has over AMD in the IGP department is QuickSync. However, it is a big factor in some areas.
Is that so?http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-4600m-trinity-piledriver,3202-16.html
So you buy the worse performing hardware because it's good enough? They went with "good enough" on the CPU side and are still improving on the GPU side. Hell, here's Rory Read admitting the same thing. Intel hasn't said as much, but if you look at the CPU "improvements" on Ivy Bridge and upcoming Haswell you'll see they're also doing the same. "Good enough" refers to CPU improvement and not GPU improvement, particularly where budget gaming laptops are concerned (or laptops in general. over 3/4s of new PCs sold in the US now are laptops and not desktops so graphical performance has taken the front wheel along with perf-per-watt and CPU performance sits in the back). Improving CPU performance will only help by a few FPS max when you're GPU limited by the on-die graphics. Improving on-die graphics by a significant amount and providing good enough CPU performance means you get far more substantial gains.
Err, here's another better link.
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/4/27/amds-close-future-analyzed-what-tomorrow-brings.aspx
Those who use their PC as a workstation generally have to pay more $$ for a better CPU and Intel has split its desktop platforms to supply that. So the biziness and workstation crowd is covered by more expensive chips on a more expensive feature rich platform. But what about the gamers? Well, that too is getting weird. Year-to-year discrete GPU sales have gone down by 3%. Although nV/AMD will attribute this to hard drive shortage, the problem is that this same trend wasn't seen in laptops/desktops. Instead of increasing discrete GPU sales they've actually gone down. What the hell? Well, the reason for that is the prevalence of cheap laptops and HD3000+APUs which have stolen the thunder from low end discrete GPU sales. HD4000 now means that Intel doesn't need nVidia/AMD for low-tier discrete GPUs while Trinity can perform as well as a 6630-6650m discrete GPU. This doesn't affect only laptops, despite laptops now making up the overwhelming % of sales, but also on the desktop. Business PCs focused around offices don't need a discrete GPU anymore and the low TDP of SB has allowed OEMs to make small and cheap PCs because they also skip on discrete GPUs. Llano on the desktop has also allowed for lower res gaming on higher settings for the gaming crowd.
It's sort of strange, really, but expected if you think about it. Considering so many people are bypassing desktops and just going with laptops and tablets, Intel and AMD have focused on providing the extras that would benefit their average usage. As a result, instead of having a 3820 as the main desktop chip, essentially a server chip that's better served for the job, we get the 2500K and 2600K with on-die graphics which most desktop users who buy unlocked chips just don't need. AMD hasn't done that yet but they're also embracing the full APU strategy that Intel has already adopted [though if you count Faildozer then they technically have as it's a server-first architecture]. Combine the on-die graphics on desktop enthusiast chips with the fact that most of the improvements generation-to-generation are going to be graphical in nature, we're definitely seeing both companies tell us we've been spoiled by expecting CPU performances and they're spending their R&D elsewhere.
Outside of the 2011 workstation platform and AMD's horrible attempt at selling us a crappy server processor, the last year+ has been almost all on-die graphics focused. Haswell and Kaveri are looking to be much of the same as well. This shift of R&D and focus is one of the reasons I want to dump my desktop entirely. I don't need a workstation and I've outgrown supermagic enthusiast gaming. As a hardware enthusiast it seems I've fallen in with the mobile crowd.
Way to pick TF2, awesome game.
However, like you said, it's not necessarily known for its grapical fidelity.
Yes, that is so. The link you provided said the image quality is much improved and good given the market being target. It's both because of software and hardware improvements.
Honestly, the only thing that Intel has over AMD in the IGP department is QuickSync. However, it is a big factor in some areas.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22932/8Both VCE and QuickSync appear to halve transcoding times... except the latter looks to be considerably faster. We didn't see much of a difference in output image quality between the two, but the output files had drastically different sizes. QuickSync spat out a 69MB video, while VCE got the trailer down to 38MB. (Our source file was 189MB.) Using QuickSync in high-quality mode extended the Core i7-3760QM's encoding time to about 10 seconds, but the resulting file was even larger—around 100MB. The output of the software encoder, for reference, weighed in at 171MB.
The brand-new VCE block throws hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding into the mix, too—something that's important not just for performance and power efficiency reasons, but also for enabling new features like wireless displays
Moving water is a very difficult thing to encode properly, but CME’s Quick Sync version looks like something hacked together with MS Paint and QuickTime 1.0. There are additional differences between the various outputs that we can’t show you in a still image. Stargate:AoT was shot and encoded on the DVD at 23.97 frames per second (often called 24p). The GTX 580 and the Quick Sync file maintain this frame rate. The Radeon 7950 and the software-encoded version increase the frame rate to 30 fps. In the old days, when a 24p film had to be modified for broadcast television, this was done by repeating frames using a method known as 2:3 pulldown.
There’s absolutely no reason to convert a 24p film for 30p playback on a modern digital device. Doing so creates a perceptible judder in motion sequences. It also increases file size by adding 25% more frames.
So you quote my TL/DR block o' text and assume it's still "good enough" in GPU performance and not CPU performance?
In case you missed it, here's the Ivy Bridge review.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review
Here's the Haswell architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)
And AMD is also focusing mostly on GPU improvements as well.
Kaveri
http://www.nordichardware.com/news/...s-performance-on-par-with-radeon-hd-7750.html
Trinity
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22932
By definition, if driver updates don't improve it that means hardware has, which was exactly my point. HD3000 doesn't run into an IQ problem because of drivers but because of hardware.