Computer Graphics

Graphics is one of the most important part of the computer experience. This is because the eye is the man’s best sensor that captures most of the details regarding any object. It may be an interesting subject to discuss about, whether this is the best main output device choice for computers, but for now we have to accept that the industry continues to move in this direction.

All computers (and most computer-like devices) have graphics chips that can process 2D and 3D image data. The only difference between graphics chips is speed and software support version. There are three manufacturers that supply the best (and/or most popular) graphics processors on the market: AMD, nVidia and Intel. AMD is in the first place because its last two generations of graphics processors proved to be highly efficient, even if they don’t have the best performance. AMD’s main competitor, nVidia, has released many unsuccessful graphics processors in the recent years. It seems that nVidia has chosen the wrong path which lead to many problems in the manufacturing process, but ultimately even nVidia released a graphics processor with very competitive performance, efficiency and price. This was the nVidia GeForce GTX 460, member of the previous generation of graphics processors released earlier this year. Since then nVidia has made significant improvements to its high end chips, but they are far from being as efficient as AMD products. On the performance side however, they deliver more than AMD. Nvidia’s single GPU solution seems to be 20% better than what AMD has to offer.

This is what happened in the desktop sector, but laptops are another story. ATI gained market share in 2010 with its Mobility Radeon 5870 graphics chips, configurable in CrossFire setups. Nvidia has worked hard and managed to beat a single Mobility Radeon 5870 card with a GTX 480M, but not without sacrificing efficiency. For single card laptops it’s not a problem, but when manufacturers tried to install two GTX 480M cards into one laptop, it proved to be too problematic. Some specialized manufacturers like Clevo managed to install two GTX 480M graphics cards in one Core i7 mobile workstation, however the power requirement of this portable system exceeds 300Watts, while the two AMD cards keep total power consumption under 200Watts. This was a major setback for nVidia, but it has recently found a compromise solution.

nVidia released more efficient laptop graphicscards, based on the first successful card in the desktop GTX 4xx family, the GTX 460. Now two nVidia GeForce GTX 460M cards can be installed in a laptop, without requiring too much power. According to tests made by Tomshardware.com the new HD 5870-killer cards installed in a high-end mobile workstation based on Intel’s Core i7-950 Quad Core processor, require only 266Watts to kick AMD’s ass in most 3D games.

Crysis, a popular game used for benchmarks because of its extremely demanding 3D engine, shows a 20% performance difference between the Radeon Mobility 5870 Crossfire configuration and the nVidia Geforce GTX 460M SLI laptop system. These results are consistent with the power consumption test results, which show 200Watts for the laptop based on AMD graphics and 266Watts for the nVidia based one.

Other benchmarks give confusing results, you may come to your own conclusions if you look at Tomshardware’s benchmark results, but in my opinion the most realistic conclusion is that nVidia made faster cards that consume more power, proportional to the performance increase.

In the near future AMD Radeon 6500M and 6300M graphics processors will appear.

AMD Radeon 6300M is very similar to what Bobcat processors will have built-in. These relatively new chips will have 80 stream processors, twice more than current Radeon 4200 chips, DDR3 memory interface for SidePort memory or usual dedicated memory. DirectX 11 will be supported, shader model 5.0 and Direct Compute 11 being the most important features. UVD2 (Unified video decoder 2) is also present, taking away significant workload from the processor while playing video files. A relatively new feature is the AMD HD3D technology, which follows the stereoscopic viewing trend with the help of shutter glasses. For this to work some special acceleration algorithms were implemented in the GPU to be able to display 120Hz video clips and even 3D games in some cases. The new GPU can address up to four monitors with independent content, with or without Eyefinity technology.

Engine clock speed will be somewhere between 500 and 750MHz, but there are a couple of laptop manufacturers that will probably reduce frequencies below 400MHz in order to minimize power consumption, and some will choose to overclock it, so their laptops will support better 3D gaming without adding a special dedicated graphics card.

The AMD Radeon 6500M will be a much much faster GPU, comparable to the Radeon 4650 desktop graphics card with 320 stream processors. The AMD Radeon 6500M GPU will have 400 such stream processors, giving it much more processing power. It will support up to 6 additional displays with Eyefinity technology, connected to all kinds of compatible display ports (Analog VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort …etc.). An enhanced UVD2 design will allow the GPU to process two FullHD streams simultaneously, without bothering the CPU too much. This is very important if the laptop is used for many different tasks at once, because the processor has only 1-6 cores to divide amongst all applications, so it’s best if video streams and graphics are handled by the 400 stream processors found in the GPU.

Some laptops have appeared in on-line stores for a few hours featuring these new chips from AMD, but they were taken down immediately or simply just cannot be purchased yet. What we know for sure is that in the near future there will be very important battles between AMD and nVidia is the desktop and laptop sector too.

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