News - Intel Ivy Bridge performance numbers slide in

[cjs150]

CAT-THE FIFTH: I am one of the people who is still running an old 9800 admittedly with a bit of an overclock (nothing too fancy) and as my monitor is only on 1600 res it can happily cope with virtually all the games I play. You can get a lot out of a cheap discrete GPU, much more than even the best of the IGPs. If casual gamers are playing very modern games (that is a very big if, surely if casual they are more likely to be playing older games) then no matter whether you prefer AMD or Intel, you would do better by spending £120-150 on a graphics card. Now I will happily admit that the AMD IGP is better than Intels but the issue becomes one of is that performance benefit actually worth it:

1. If both Intel i3 and AMD A8 can both run a game but at less than 30 fps, the fact that AMD is faster is probably of limited interest because most people would regard as neither being playable.
2. Maybe it is just me but on a laptop screen I cannot tell the difference between AMD or intel on video playback

As for battery life if you compare an A8 to an i3 the A8 comes off worse (more cores) at load. however, whether this translates into a meaningful difference under normal usage I do not know - if battery life is 5hrs does 3 or 4 minutes one way or another really matter in the real world

Just to make it clear I am neither an intel nor an AMD fan boy, I will happily use either and have done so in past. I keep meaning to get round to a simple HTPC build and AMD will be my choice (but the Zotac nano AD10 is so cute). Of course as of today the i3 is £10-15 cheaper than the A8 at scan

[watercooled]

The 9800 is still a decent card to be using and should handle most games fine. Llano's IGP is actually faster than cheap (~£50 or less) cards so you get quite a lot for your money and it really can make the difference between a game being unplayable and running at a decent framerate: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4476/amd-a83850-review/5

The difference with video playback mainly comes with films and their frame rates - the Intel IGP doesn't properly support it so you get repeated frames every few seconds which appears as a short pause/stutter. It annoys some people more than others but can be incredibly frustrating for some, to the point it's unbearable to watch. And then you have post-processing which is a big reason HTPC users have been using a discrete card, again the Llano IGP handles this much better than either the Intel GPU or a cheap discrete card.

I don't know many people who keep their laptop CPU fully loaded, in normal use there's not much in it - both brands draw very little power at idle and other design choices are likely to make more of a difference than CPU choice.

[Golden Dragoon]

Hmm, i cant really agree with anything that the site goes on about. It says the demise of AMD is that it cant penetrate any market as they are far to late to them, they are doing fairly well in laptops and desktops really. The main thing is that they say about how consoles are going to be amazing and put pressure on AMD, i dont get how they have missed this part? AMD MAKE THE GPU FOR XBOX so can someone please tell me why AMD would do worse if consoles continue to succeed? AMD make a good chunk from console sales i reckon and thats probably a suitable reason why their GPU department does so well!.

They also provided the gpu of the Wii, which has considerably higher sales, but AMD don't get money based on how many consoles are sold, as they don't make the chip, they licence the design to Nintendo\Microsoft who then take that design to whatever fab company they like and get it made.
Basically Nintendo or Microsoft pay them an effectively fixed amount per year for the design and AMD's support (for process shrinks, or integration).
nVidia provided the gpu for the first Xbox, and they had a deal where Microsoft payed them to design and manufacture the gpu, so in those days nVidia were making money on every Xbox, and whenever they were able to shrink the process or reduce their costs that meant more profit as the cost savings weren't passed onto Microsoft.

[dcwt2010]

When you said 9800 I thought it was the Radeon 9800 which still powers one of my ancient home PCs!