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I would pay a pretty premium for a 4K display, no graphics card, big battery, ~15" diagonal. Companies seem to think that if you want a 4K you also want Perfor

by Taek 10y ago

I would pay a pretty premium for a 4K display, no graphics card, big battery, ~15" diagonal. Companies seem to think that if you want a 4K you also want Performance. No, seriously I just want this as a glorified text editor. Give me screen resolution, and give me battery life. I'll pay more if you leave out the GPU because then it'll be lighter and draw less power.

pjc50 10y ago
I think if you actually had one of those you'd be very disappointed. 4k is rather a lot of pixels. You need at least a reasonable 2D GPU if you want to be able to move windows around without ghosting everywhere. Blitting everything through the CPU would be far more power-hungry than delegating it to dedicated hardware. Not to mention that a lot of people would be upset at not being able to watch Youtube fullscreen in decent resolution, for which you would need hardware decoding.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  OP probably means no discrete GPU, which these days means intel graphics. The latest ones should be able to drive 4K without issue.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    They can comfortably and on linux really well, I like them for everything but gaming/heavy 3D they are great.
    - pedrocr 10y ago
      Compared to nVidia and AMD, Intel used to be much better. These days the driver situation isn't as rosy. There's a spotily maintained X driver (no releases in 3 years, updated by git snapshots) that is even being replaced by the generic modesetting driver in some distributions to avoid bugs. If you want flicker-free GUIs, tear-free video and general lack of bugs it's a bit of a crap shoot right now. The kernel driver does seem to get steady progress though, which is why the generic modesetting X driver seems to be a way forward. Meanwhile both the AMD and nVidia situations have improved with more robust open source drivers appearing. I don't have experience with those to know if they've surpassed the Intel drivers in general quality though.

by Taek 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

I think if you actually had one of those you'd be very disappointed. 4k is rather a lot of pixels. You need at least a reasonable 2D GPU if you want to be able to move windows around without ghosting everywhere. Blitting everything through the CPU would be far more power-hungry than delegating it to dedicated hardware. Not to mention that a lot of people would be upset at not being able to watch Youtube fullscreen in decent resolution, for which you would need hardware decoding.

pedrocr 10y ago
OP probably means no discrete GPU, which these days means intel graphics. The latest ones should be able to drive 4K without issue.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  They can comfortably and on linux really well, I like them for everything but gaming/heavy 3D they are great.
  - pedrocr 10y ago
    Compared to nVidia and AMD, Intel used to be much better. These days the driver situation isn't as rosy. There's a spotily maintained X driver (no releases in 3 years, updated by git snapshots) that is even being replaced by the generic modesetting driver in some distributions to avoid bugs. If you want flicker-free GUIs, tear-free video and general lack of bugs it's a bit of a crap shoot right now. The kernel driver does seem to get steady progress though, which is why the generic modesetting X driver seems to be a way forward. Meanwhile both the AMD and nVidia situations have improved with more robust open source drivers appearing. I don't have experience with those to know if they've surpassed the Intel drivers in general quality though.