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I do hope that between M-series SoCs and AMD APUs, it becomes normal and expected for mainstream computing devices across the board to have reasonable graphical
by jwells89 3y ago
I do hope that between M-series SoCs and AMD APUs, it becomes normal and expected for mainstream computing devices across the board to have reasonable graphical capabilities without the unavoidable heat, power hunger, and added cost of a discrete GPU. There’s not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs.
The benefit from this happening would be twofold: it gives a much wider spread of users access to hardware that can deal well with moderate graphical workloads and it provides a common minimum spec for game devs to keep in mind that’s actually powerful enough to deliver a decent experience (as compared to now, where iGPUs are near writeoffs for anything but esports titles).
- gtirloni 3y ago> not much reason for iGPUs to be as weak as we’ve become accustomed to with Intel CPUs. It requires more silicon which will increase power consumption and require more heat dissipation... same issues with discrete GPUs. Where would the additional performance come from?
- jwells89 3y agoSomewhat powerful iGPUs do require more silicon, but the design of that silicon is going to differ compared its discrete counterpart — whereas discrete GPUs are typically designed for most performance possible with the least silicon at the cost of heat and power usage, iGPUs are designed for perf per watt, as seen in Apple’s M-series SoCs. There’s probably some energy savings to be had from the GPU sharing system memory and moving data around less. On the software side of things, iGPU drivers tend to better optimized for efficiency compared to discrete GPU drivers, where that’s almost an afterthought and in some cases broken (like the laptop I had where the sleep state in the drivers for its Nvidia card was broken for years).