4 ms·

Any gamers or graphics experts here? I keep hearing that Intel's integrated graphics is terrible, yet being a typical desktop user/non-gamer, I've always avoide

Any gamers or graphics experts here? I keep hearing that Intel's integrated graphics is terrible, yet being a typical desktop user/non-gamer, I've always avoided dedicated GPUs in favor of Intel on purpose. Intel GMAs always offered better battery life, better Linux compatibility, better operating temperatures (and zero additional fan noise) yet they did everything a non-gamer can ask for: hardware-accelerated video playback, desktop effects like the ones Steven writes about, etc. Recently I looked into AMD's 2400G APU with much superior graphics but I don't understand what is it for. Sure it can sort of run some games at mediocre frame rates on last-century 1080p monitors, but not higher. But everything else Intel will do just as well... Looks like all these integrated GPUs are starved of memory bandwidth anyway. So what's the point of these APUs then? Where's the AMD graphics advantage? And what's problem then with Intel's integrated graphics?

mynameisvlad 8y ago
Here's an Anandtech benchmark from the relatively recent release of Ryzen+Vega: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-the-amd-ryzen-5-2400g-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t... Essentially, the current gen Intel GMAs are more or less equivalent to AMD's last gen APUs. Ryzen with Vega is around 3x faster. In the past, AMD tended to focus on the iGPU at the expense of the CPU, but with Ryzen, it's also comparable to Coffee Lake while maintaining the massive GPU lead.
nfriedly 8y ago
My macbook runs on Intel integrated graphics, and I frequently want just a little bit more performance for day-to-day work. In particular, if you set a 4k monitor to 1440p effective resolution in macOS, it renders a 5k (1440p doubled) image and then down-scales that to 4k. This seems like it would be ideal but in practice, things are too laggy. I upgraded from a 1440p monitor to a 4k one, but I ended up going down to 1080p effective in order to get acceptable performance due to intel's under-powered integrated graphics. I'm fairly positive that AMD's APUs would be sufficient in this scenario. On the gaming side, I also just got a GPD Win 2, which is a little handheld gaming computer that runs on a Intel Core m3 (graphics and all). At 720p, the Intel integrated graphics can actual run a lot of games, especially older ones. But OF COURSE I'd like to see better performance there. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have anything available yet for that power/TDP range (7w).
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  > This seems like it would be ideal This seems lazy. Instead of properly supporting 2160p you get a sad kludge instead.
  - xenadu02 8y ago
    The work required of developers to support arbitrary DPI is more or less impossible. No system anywhere has ever managed it. Intel GPUs are underpowered and have been for a long time. Their drivers are also full of bugs and odd edge cases. Intel saw iGPUs as a value-add for makers of cheap systems and treated them as such. That's a major point of Sinofsky's piece: graphics ended up being important and Intel knee-capped themselves and all their partners by failing to understand that. He gives an example: You can't put a discrete GPU into that 10" laptop or Intel will kill you by removing your discounts and kickbacks, making your laptop more expensive than your competitors.
    - OkGoDoIt 8y ago
      Windows has been attempting to get this working well for years, and for the most part it was horrible. But over the last year or so I've found arbitrary DPI scaling on Windows has worked very well, at least meeting my expectations and being more flexible than Mac's implementation. Mac took the less painful route but at this point Windows might finally start having the advantage here.
ksec 8y ago
You have to remember the GPU described in the article were in 2010 - 2012 era. And it was iGPU in Atoms. They key to GPU performance were drivers, and Intel in those days won't very active in GPU drivers development. At the time updating GPU drivers for notebook were problematic. Lot of issues left unresolved, and Mozilla blacklist lot of Intel drivers from GPU acceleration. And they (purposely?) make a mess of dGPU graphics switching. It wasn't until Broadwell, and later Iris Graphics era, which I think is 2012 / 2013 before things starting to pick up. Intel actively optimising their drivers for stability, OpenGL, and Performance. AMD's Graphics Advantage is that their drivers are better tested. Over the near three decades of history has taught us, the GPU hardware is absolutely nothing with out top notch drivers support. Intel I740, Matrox, 3Dfx, S3 Verge, 3Dlabs, PowerVR......
- mjevans 8y ago
  Actually the early Intel GPU efforts were hillariously bad partly because they licensed someone else's GPU... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub#Poulsbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub#Poulsbo There /still/ isn't support for this closed platform on Linux/etc based systems due to a combination of (now) outdated hardware, very few systems in developer hands (even lower interest), and the lack of performance even with proper drivers* (I don't have a good citation for that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture) It didn't help that the power requirements fell very solidly in to the uncanny valley between 'crappy, but very low power so we can forgive it' and 'good, but uses lots of power'.
- bhouston 8y ago
  You are not correct that it is all in the drivers. The Intel GPUs just do not have the FLops to complete with the high end offerings from NVIDIA and AMD. Here is a realistic benchmark of GPUs and notice that Intel isn't even listed in the first page, that is how slow Intel's GPU is: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/
rifung 8y ago
> Any gamers or graphics experts here? > And what's problem then with Intel's integrated graphics? I play video games. The problem with Intel's integrated graphics is simple: they have historically not been powerful enough that you can run many video games at a playable fps.
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
> Recently I looked into AMD's 2400G APU with much superior graphics but I don't understand what is it for. Sure it can sort of run some games at mediocre frame rates on last-century 1080p monitors, but not higher. Historically, AMD/ATI integrated graphics chipsets were a budget-friendly alternative to avoid the performance void that Intel integrated graphics provided. Everyone who gamed on the budget end knew this. You looked for AMD/ATI integrated, or if you had the money to spend, NVIDIA had some discrete solutions as well. Over the years, Intel stepped up their game and closed the gap. However, these days even the Intel Iris platform is poor where used, because it's typically utilized on higher-end computing where high resolution monitors are provided to match. Because pixel fill rate is a bottleneck for all graphics solutions, the gains that Intel Iris provide are set back by the higher resolutions they tend to be required to drive.
pjmlp 8y ago
Intel's OpenGL drivers were traditionally quite buggy and tended to lie about what features they actually supported in hardware. So depending on the execution paths you could even trigger software rendering by relying on wrong assumptions.
majewsky 8y ago
> on last-century 1080p monitors Were you around in the last century? :) I don't remember 1080p monitors becoming common anywhere before circa 2005.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  1080p is the bane of the 21st century. In the 20th century, we had 1200p monitors (i.e. 1600x1200). onion, belt, etc.
  - workinfunk 8y ago
    Not sure what point you're trying to make, but 1200p was just barely a thing at the turn of the century, and only for CRT. It would have cost you $300-400 and still not have been full HD. Completely different beast. FWIW, the LCD screens of the day topped out at 1024x768.
archagon 8y ago
As of 2013, at least, the Intel chips were pretty good. Not top-of-the-line by any stretch, but 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as the discrete chip in my Macbook: http://archagon.net/blog/2013/12/19/late-2013-15-macbook-pro-intel-iris-pro-5200-vs-nvidia-750m-and-other-stories/ http://archagon.net/blog/2013/12/19/late-2013-15-macbook-pro... Still, I'd want as much power as humanly possible for gaming on the go. 15-20 extra frames per second matters a lot.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mynameisvlad 8y ago

Here's an Anandtech benchmark from the relatively recent release of Ryzen+Vega: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-the-amd-ryzen-5-2400g-review/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t... Essentially, the current gen Intel GMAs are more or less equivalent to AMD's last gen APUs. Ryzen with Vega is around 3x faster. In the past, AMD tended to focus on the iGPU at the expense of the CPU, but with Ryzen, it's also comparable to Coffee Lake while maintaining the massive GPU lead.

nfriedly 8y ago

My macbook runs on Intel integrated graphics, and I frequently want just a little bit more performance for day-to-day work. In particular, if you set a 4k monitor to 1440p effective resolution in macOS, it renders a 5k (1440p doubled) image and then down-scales that to 4k. This seems like it would be ideal but in practice, things are too laggy. I upgraded from a 1440p monitor to a 4k one, but I ended up going down to 1080p effective in order to get acceptable performance due to intel's under-powered integrated graphics. I'm fairly positive that AMD's APUs would be sufficient in this scenario. On the gaming side, I also just got a GPD Win 2, which is a little handheld gaming computer that runs on a Intel Core m3 (graphics and all). At 720p, the Intel integrated graphics can actual run a lot of games, especially older ones. But OF COURSE I'd like to see better performance there. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have anything available yet for that power/TDP range (7w).

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
> This seems like it would be ideal This seems lazy. Instead of properly supporting 2160p you get a sad kludge instead.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  The work required of developers to support arbitrary DPI is more or less impossible. No system anywhere has ever managed it. Intel GPUs are underpowered and have been for a long time. Their drivers are also full of bugs and odd edge cases. Intel saw iGPUs as a value-add for makers of cheap systems and treated them as such. That's a major point of Sinofsky's piece: graphics ended up being important and Intel knee-capped themselves and all their partners by failing to understand that. He gives an example: You can't put a discrete GPU into that 10" laptop or Intel will kill you by removing your discounts and kickbacks, making your laptop more expensive than your competitors.
  - OkGoDoIt 8y ago
    Windows has been attempting to get this working well for years, and for the most part it was horrible. But over the last year or so I've found arbitrary DPI scaling on Windows has worked very well, at least meeting my expectations and being more flexible than Mac's implementation. Mac took the less painful route but at this point Windows might finally start having the advantage here.

ksec 8y ago

You have to remember the GPU described in the article were in 2010 - 2012 era. And it was iGPU in Atoms. They key to GPU performance were drivers, and Intel in those days won't very active in GPU drivers development. At the time updating GPU drivers for notebook were problematic. Lot of issues left unresolved, and Mozilla blacklist lot of Intel drivers from GPU acceleration. And they (purposely?) make a mess of dGPU graphics switching. It wasn't until Broadwell, and later Iris Graphics era, which I think is 2012 / 2013 before things starting to pick up. Intel actively optimising their drivers for stability, OpenGL, and Performance. AMD's Graphics Advantage is that their drivers are better tested. Over the near three decades of history has taught us, the GPU hardware is absolutely nothing with out top notch drivers support. Intel I740, Matrox, 3Dfx, S3 Verge, 3Dlabs, PowerVR......

mjevans 8y ago
Actually the early Intel GPU efforts were hillariously bad partly because they licensed someone else's GPU... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub#Poulsbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub#Poulsbo There /still/ isn't support for this closed platform on Linux/etc based systems due to a combination of (now) outdated hardware, very few systems in developer hands (even lower interest), and the lack of performance even with proper drivers* (I don't have a good citation for that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture) It didn't help that the power requirements fell very solidly in to the uncanny valley between 'crappy, but very low power so we can forgive it' and 'good, but uses lots of power'.
bhouston 8y ago
You are not correct that it is all in the drivers. The Intel GPUs just do not have the FLops to complete with the high end offerings from NVIDIA and AMD. Here is a realistic benchmark of GPUs and notice that Intel isn't even listed in the first page, that is how slow Intel's GPU is: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/

rifung 8y ago

> Any gamers or graphics experts here? > And what's problem then with Intel's integrated graphics? I play video games. The problem with Intel's integrated graphics is simple: they have historically not been powerful enough that you can run many video games at a playable fps.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

> Recently I looked into AMD's 2400G APU with much superior graphics but I don't understand what is it for. Sure it can sort of run some games at mediocre frame rates on last-century 1080p monitors, but not higher. Historically, AMD/ATI integrated graphics chipsets were a budget-friendly alternative to avoid the performance void that Intel integrated graphics provided. Everyone who gamed on the budget end knew this. You looked for AMD/ATI integrated, or if you had the money to spend, NVIDIA had some discrete solutions as well. Over the years, Intel stepped up their game and closed the gap. However, these days even the Intel Iris platform is poor where used, because it's typically utilized on higher-end computing where high resolution monitors are provided to match. Because pixel fill rate is a bottleneck for all graphics solutions, the gains that Intel Iris provide are set back by the higher resolutions they tend to be required to drive.

pjmlp 8y ago

Intel's OpenGL drivers were traditionally quite buggy and tended to lie about what features they actually supported in hardware. So depending on the execution paths you could even trigger software rendering by relying on wrong assumptions.

majewsky 8y ago

> on last-century 1080p monitors Were you around in the last century? :) I don't remember 1080p monitors becoming common anywhere before circa 2005.

perl4ever 8y ago
1080p is the bane of the 21st century. In the 20th century, we had 1200p monitors (i.e. 1600x1200). onion, belt, etc.
- workinfunk 8y ago
  Not sure what point you're trying to make, but 1200p was just barely a thing at the turn of the century, and only for CRT. It would have cost you $300-400 and still not have been full HD. Completely different beast. FWIW, the LCD screens of the day topped out at 1024x768.

archagon 8y ago

As of 2013, at least, the Intel chips were pretty good. Not top-of-the-line by any stretch, but 1/2 to 2/3 as fast as the discrete chip in my Macbook: http://archagon.net/blog/2013/12/19/late-2013-15-macbook-pro-intel-iris-pro-5200-vs-nvidia-750m-and-other-stories/ http://archagon.net/blog/2013/12/19/late-2013-15-macbook-pro... Still, I'd want as much power as humanly possible for gaming on the go. 15-20 extra frames per second matters a lot.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]