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The RV870 Story: AMD Showing up to the Fightby Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/14/2010 12:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
132 Comments
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simtex - Sunday, February 21, 2010 - linkExcellent article ;) Insider info is always interesting, makes me a little more happy about my -50% AMD stocks, hopefully they will one go up again. Reply
NKnight - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - linkGreat read. Reply
- Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
you should write a (few)book(s); of course in multi eReader formats
asH Reply
- Saturday, February 20, 2010 - linkNvidia blames sales shortfall on TSMC
one dot you didnt connect in the article was AMD's foundry experience, which gives AMD a big advantage over NVIDIA; must have been an oversight?
truk007 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkThese articles are why I keep coming here. The other sites could learn a lesson here.
dstigue1 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkI think the title says it all. But to add I also like the technical level. You can understand it with some cursory knowledge in graphics technology. Wonderfully written. Reply
sotoa - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkExcellent work and very insightful indeed! Reply
juzz86 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkAn amazing read Anand, I can wholeheartedly understand why you'd enjoy your dinners so much. One reader said that these were among the best articles on the site, and I have to agree. Inside looks into developments in the industry like this one are the real hidden gems of reviewing and analysis today. You should be very proud. Thanks again. Justin. Reply
talon262 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkHell of an article...congrats to Anand for putting it out there and to the team at ATI for executing on some hard-learned lessons. Since I have a 4850 X2, I'm most likely going to sit Evergreen out (the only current ATI card that specs higher than my 4850 X2 (other than the 4970 X2) is Hemlock/5970 and Cypress/5870 would be a lateral move, more or less); while I run Win7, DX11 compatibilty is not a huge priority for me right this moment, but I will use the mid-range Evergreen parts for any systems I'll build/refurb over the next few months.
Northern Islands, that has got me salivating...
(Crossposted at Rage3D) Reply
Peroxyde - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkThanks for the great article. Do you have any info regarding ATI's commitment to the Linux platform? I used to see in Linux forums about graphics driver issues that ATI is the brand to avoid. Is it still the case? Reply
Spoelie - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - linkphoronix.com
for all things ATi + Linux Reply
SeanHollister - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkFantastic work, Anand. It's so difficult to make pieces like this work without coming across as puffery, but everything here feels genuine and evenhanded. Here's hoping for similar articles featuring individuals at NVIDIA, Intel and beyond in the not-too-distant future. Reply
boslink - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkJust like many others i'm also reading/visiting anandtech for years but this article made me register just to say damn good job.
Also for the long time i didn't read article from cover to cover. Usually i read first page and maybe second (enough to guess what's in other pages) and than skip to conclusions.
But this article remind us that Graphic card/chip is not only silicon. Real people story is what makes this article great.
Thanks Anand Reply
AmdInside - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkGreat article as usual. Sunspot seems like the biggest non-factor in the 5x00 series. Except for hardware reviews sites which have lots of monitors lying around, I just don't see a need for it. It is like NVIDIA's 3D Vision. Concept sounds good but in general practice, it is not very realistic that a user will use it. Just another check box that a company can point to to an OEM and say we have it and they don't. NVIDIA has had Eyefinity for a while (SLI Mosaic). It just is very expensive since it is targeted towards businesses and not consumers and offers some features Eyefinity doesn't offer.I think NVIDIA just didn't believe consumers really wanted it but added it afterwards just so that ATI doesn't have a checkbox they can brag about. But NVIDIA probably still believes this is mainly a business feature.
It is always interesting to learn how businesses make product decisions internally. I always hate reading interviews of PR people. I learn zero. Talk to engineers if you really want to learn something. Reply
BelardA - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkI think the point of Eyefinity is that its more hardware based and natural... not requiring so much work from the game publisher. A way of having higher screen details over a span of monitors.
A few games will actually span 2 or 3 monitors. Or some will use the 2nd display as a control panel. With Eyefinity, it tells the game "I have #### x #### pixels" and auto divides the signal onto 3 or 6 screens and be playable. That is quite cool.
But as you say, its a bit of a non-factor. Most users will still only have one display to work with. Hmmm. there was a monitor that was almost seamless 3-monitors built together, where is that?
Also, I think the TOP-SECRET aspect of Sun-Spots was a way of testing security. Eyefinity isn't a major thing... but the hiding of it was.
While employees do move about in the business, the sharing of trade-secrets could still get them in trouble - if caught. It does happen, but how much?
gomakeit - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkI love these insightful articles! This is why Anandtech is one of my favorite tech sites ever! Reply
Smell This - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkProbably could have done without the snide reference to the CPU division at the end of the article - it added nothing and was a detraction from the overall piece.
It also implies a symbiotic relationship between AMDs 40+ year battle with Chipzilla and the GPU Wars with nV. Not really an accurate correlation. The CPU division has their own headaches.
It is appropriate to note, however, that both divisions must bring their 'A' Game to the table with the upcoming convergence on-die of the CPU-GPU. Reply
mrwilton - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkThank you, Anand, for this great and fun-to-read article. It really has been some time where I have read an article cover to cover.
Keep up the excellent work.
Best wishes, wt Reply
Ananke - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkI have 5850, it is a great card. However, what people saying about PC gaming is true - gaming on PC slowly fades towards consoles. You cannot justify several thousand-dollar PC versus a 2-300 multimedia console.
So powerful GPU is a supercomputer by itself. Please ATI, make better Avivo transcoder, push open software development using Steam further. We need many applications, not just Photoshop and Cyberlink. We need hundreds, and many free, to utilize this calculation power. Then, it will make sense to use this cards. Reply
erple2 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkPerhaps. However, this "PC Gaming is being killed off by the 2-300 multimedia console" war has been going on since the Playstation 1 came out. PC gaming is still doing very well.
I think that there will always be some sort of market (even if only 10% - that's significant enough to make companies take notice) for PC Gaming. While I still have to use the PC for something, I'll continue to use it for gaming, as well.
Reading the article, I find it poignant that the focus is on //execution// rather than //ideas//. It reminds me of a blog written by Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/01/cultivate...">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/01/cultivate... if you're interested) about the exact same thing. Focus on what you //do//. Execution (ie "what do we have an 80%+ chance of getting done on time) is more important than the idea (ie features you can claim on a spec sheet).
As a hardware developer (goes the same for any software developer), your job is to release the product. That means following a schedule. That means focusing on what you can do, not on what you want to do. It sounds to me like ATI has been following that paradigm, which is why they seem to be doing so well these days.
What's particularly encouraging about the story written was that Management had the foresight to actually listen to the technical side when coming up with the schedules and requirements. That, in and of itself, is something that a significant number of companies just don't do well.
It's nice to hear from the internal wing of the company from time to time, and not just the glossy presentation of hardware releases.
I for one thoroughly enjoyed the read. I liked the perspective that the RV5-- err Evergreen gave on the process of developing hardware. What works, and what doesn't.
Great article. Goes down in my book with the SSD and RV770 articles as some of the best IT reads I've done. Reply
tomoyo - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkAnother awesome article about the real situation behind the hardware from you Anand! I was on the USS Hornet and wish I had talked to you, but it was a great time nonetheless. It's interesting the change in their thought process between the RV770 and RV870, I hope they keep the winning streak up for the next refresh cycle (which hopefully will stay on the market bulges). Reply
WT - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link*sigh* ^^^
There's always one in the crowd.
Take care in the fact that you are the only person who hasn't enjoyed this read. Reply
MegaManX4 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkReminds me much of the Anglo-Saxon "documantaries", where it is always of tertiary relevance WHAT is actually discussed, but it is always of utmost interest how the responsible person "feels" about what he is just seeing, other than just stating the facts.
There seems to be a huge crowd vowing for that kind of journalism, Whatever pleases the canaille.
"Jedem das Seine" or "to each his own" then Reply
MegaManX4 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkThis was actually the worst article i have ever read at anandtech. I know that you Americans always strive for emotionally .Driven stories, but this outright borders on silly exaggeration.
"Heroes of our Industry", what a Schmalz.
Also, if one would take the real informations presented in that article, it wouldn't justify even a 2 Page Article, let alone that 11 Page behemoth.
They are engineers, they do their jobs. Nothing more, nothing less.
Greetings from Germany Reply
blowfish - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkhmm, with an attitude like that you'll never get past middle management!
Like most here, I loved this article. Anand obviously has the friendship and respect of some very senior players, and we were treated to some great insights into how things work at AMD ATI.
As the reader, you can choose to read or not read the article, simple as that. Maybe you should up your medication. Reply
MegaManX4 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkunreasonable polemic Reply
pmonti80 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkYou are the one being unreasonable. This may not be a "scientifically written" article, but no one is claiming it to be. And that's the reason this article is so interesting. Reply
saiga6360 - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - linkApparently German engineers are just soulless robots. His confusion is understandable. Reply
BelardA - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkI enjoyed this article even more than the RV770. I do recommend that everyone read that one too.
Kind of shocking that Nvidia didn't use that info from the RV770 article to learn to NOT make big GPUs like the GTX 2xx. yeah yeah, it takes 2-4 years to design a chip.
I thank ATI (and AMD) for not playing marketing games like Nvidia does... I think they have a bigger marketing department than engineers nowadays. They started with the GF2-MX 400 & GF4-MX cards (which were re-labeled updated GF2 cards that were not up to GF3 standards)... but the latest cluster-muck of Nvidia products is nothing but a mess. 8800 re-badged as a 9800 re-badged into the gts 250. Code-name of NVxx go to G80 to G92 to G100. The GT-1xx products that are actually low-end 9xxx products, same with most G200 & G300. I'm not going to be surprised when the GTX 285 gets renamed into the GTS450 at $200! I've seen people who bought the GTS250 and post on the internet "why isn't my new gts250 much faster than my old 8800GT"... because you bought a faster version of your card and thought it was something new. Wow, 3 years with 3 names for the same product, that is marketing.
ATI does good with the entire 4000 series being DX 10.1 products and 5000s are DX11. (Does anyone really use HD-5xxx?) It doesn't feel like ATI is pulling our chain with their products.
AMD should be learning from ATI, they are getting better with CPUs - 2 years late, but AMD CPUs are now faster than Core2 and compete well against the lower end intel i-confused model CPUs. There is still room for improvement which was recommend to them some time ago, but AMD is just going to come out with a new design for next year. But had AMD tweaked their CPUs a bit for another 10~20% performance, they'd be up there with i7s.
I hope in the next ATI GPU, some form of Physics engine is added to go up against nvidia's PhsyX. But perhaps that'll be part of DX12... but Microsoft no longer supports Games for Windows.
Actually, with more and more games going ONLY to consoles, I don't think the need for high-end gaming cards will be needed anymore in the next few years. If there are no games, who needs a $300 3D Gaming card?
Zink - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkWould also like to say great article. I can't wait for new distributed computing cores come out optimized for ATI's architectures. Reply
ThomasS31 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link...it would be very interesting if nVidia tell us the story openly, what happened with this long delayed newly designed chip.
Anand staff, please try and persuade them to tell all details! :) Reply
XiZeL - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkdont want to look like a fanboy here but these stories just make me like ATI even more, make me feel like part of the familiy...
why dont you guys ever write these about nVidia? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkThe only reason I'm able to write something like this is because of how open/honest/unmarkety Carrell Killebrew is. And how trusting AMD PR is that they allow me to talk to him without any sort of limitations in place.
Until recently, there hasn't been a similar contact for me at NVIDIA. That has changed in the past few months and I've already reached out to him to see if he is willing to allow me the same opportunity to talk about Fermi.
If I can make it happen, I will :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
XiZeL - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkthanks for the reply :)
just for the record, as a costumer and someone who really likes technology, these kind of articles will help me take my final descision when bying a product...
yeally looking forward to seeing the same from Nvidia and try to understand their aproach on building a chip :)
thanks again Reply
Mat3 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkI really enjoy reading stuff like this. One request for the next time you're talking to ATI guys: can you ask them about Fast14 and why it didn't work for them? Reply
Iketh - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link6900 series = Pagan
6800 series = Sarigan
6700 series = Saipan
6600/5500 series = Tinian
6400 series = Rota
Im probably way off lol Reply
hyvonen - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkLeaker! You'll be reported. Reply
XtremeOne - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkThank You for this beautiful and insightful article. Like many before me, i registered just to say that. Anandtech is one of the sites I fell very lucky to know about. Some of your articles are a bit "techie" for me, but this one is practically impossible to stop reading. :D Thank you Anand. Reply
Iketh - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkit's a shame there cant be more articles like this... having a close relationship with one company allows it every year or two, but there are many companies in this field which could produce many more stories... i feel Anand is slowly tapping into a gold mine Reply
jstall - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link
This is a fantastic article, nice to get some insight into the the RD and thought process just as much as it is to see performance charts. Be nice to see a little more of this. Reply
ImmortalZ - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkLong time reader and lurker here.
This article is one of the best I've read here - hell, it's one of the best I've ever read on any tech site. Reading about and getting perspective on what makes companies like ATI tick is great. Thank you and please, more! Reply
tygrus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkSequences of numbers in a logical way are easier to remember than names. The RV500, RV600 .. makes order obvious. Using multiple names within a generation of chips are confusing and not memorable. They do not convey sequence or relative complexity.
Can you ask if AMD are analysing current games/GPGPU and future games/GPGPU to identify possible areas for improvement or skip less useful proposed design changes. Like the Intel >2% gain for <1% cost. Reply
Yakk - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkExcellent article! As I've read in a few other comments, this article (and one similar I'd read prior) made me register for the first time, even if I've been reading this site for many years.
I could see why "Behind the scenes" articles can make certain companies nervous and others not, mostly based on their own "corporate culture" I'd think.
It was a very good read, and I'm sure every engineer who worked on any given generation on GPU's could have many stories to tell about tech challenges and baffling (at the time) corporate decisions. And also a manager's side of the work in navigating corporate red tape, working with people, while delivering something worthwhile as an end product is also a huge. Having a good manager (people) with a good subject knowledge (tech) is rare, then for Corp. Execs. to know they have one is MUCH rarer still...
If anyone at AMD/ATI read these comments, PLEASE look at the hardware division and try to implement changes to the software division to match their successes...
(btw been using nv cards almost exclusively since the TNT days, and just got a 5870 for the first time this month. ATI Hardware I'd give an "A+", Software... hmm, I'd give it a "C". Funny thing is nv is almost the exact opposite right now) Reply
Perisphetic - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkSomeone nominate this man for the Pulitzer Prize!
As many have stated before, this is a fantastic article. It goes beyond extraordinary, exceptional and excellent. This has become my new benchmark for high quality computer industry related writing.
Thank you sir. Reply
ritsu - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkIt's not exactly The Soul of a New Machine. But, fine article. It's nice to have a site willing to do this sort of work.
shaggart5446 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkvery appreciative for this article im from ja but reading this make me file like ill go back to school thanks anand ur the best big up yeah man Reply
529th - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThe little knowledge I have about the business of making a graphics card, that it was Eyefinity that stunted the stability-growth of the 5xxx drivers by the allocation of resources of the software engineers to make Eyefinity work. Reply
chizow - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI usually don't care much for these fluff/PR pieces but this one was pretty entertaining, probably because there was less coverage of what the PR/Marketing guys had to say and more emphasis on the designers and engineers. Carrell sounds like a very interesting guy and a real asset to AMD, they need more innovators like him leading their company and less media exposure from PR talking heads like Chris Hook. Almost tuned out when I saw that intro pic, thankfully the article shifted focus quickly.
As for the article itself, among the many interesting points made in there, a few that caught my eye:
1) It sounds like some of the sacrifices made with RV870's die size help explain why it fell short of doubling RV770/790 in terms of performance scaling. Seems as if memory controllers might've also been cut as edge real estate was lost, and happen to be the most glaring case where RV870 specs weren't doubled with regard to RV770.
2) The whole cloak and dagger bit with EyeFinity was very amusing and certainly helps give these soulless tech giants some humanity and color.
3) Also with EyeFinity, I'd probably say Nvidia's solution will ultimately be better, as long as AMD continues to struggle with CrossFire EyeFinity support. It actually seems as if Nvidia is applying the same framebuffer splitting technology via PCIe/SLI link with their recently announced Optimus technology to Nvidia Surround, both of course lending technology from their Quadro line of cards.
4) The discussion about fabs/yields was also very interesting and helps shed some light on some of the differences between the strategies used by both companies in the past to present. AMD has always leveraged new process technologies in the past as soon as possible, Nvidia in the past has more closely followed Intel's Tick/Tock cadence of building high-end on mature processes and teething smaller chips on new processes. That clearly changed this time around on 40nm so it'll be interesting to see what AMD does going forward. I was surprised there wasn't any discussion about why AMD hasn't looked into GlobalFoundries as their GPU foundry.
SuperGee - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linknV eyeFinity counter solution is a fast software reaction wich is barly the same thing. You need SLI because one GPU can do only 2 active ports. That the main diference. So you depend on a more high-end platform. A SLI mobo PSU capable of feeding two Gcards. While ATI give yo 3 or 6 ou t of one GPU.
nV can deliver something native in there next design. Equal and the possibility to be better at it. But we are still waiting for there DX11 parts. I wonder if they could slap a solution in the refresh or can do only wenn they introduce the new archtecture "GF200".
chizow - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkActually EyeFinity's current CF problems are most likely a software problem which is why Nvidia's solution is already superior from a flexibility and scalability standpoint. They've clearly worked out the kinks of running multiple GPUs to a single frame buffer and then redistributing portions of that framebuffer to different GPU outputs.
AMD's solution seems to have problems because output on each individual GPU is only downstream atm, so while one GPU can send frame data to a primary GPU for CF, it seems secondary GPUs have problems receiving frame data to output portions of the frame.
Why I say Nvidia's solution is better overall is simply because the necessity of SLI will automatically decrease the chance of a poor gaming experience when gaming at triple resolutions, which is clearly a problem with some newer games and single-GPU EyeFinity. Also, if AMD was able to use multiple card display outputs, it would solve the problem of requiring a $100 active DP dongle for the 3rd output if a user doesn't have a DP capable monitor. Reply
Stas - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAwesome. Thanks! Reply
Adul - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkReally helps pass the time at work today. :) Keep it up.
Btw when can we expect to see the new site launch? Reply
aapocketz - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link[quote]I was convinced that ATI had embraced a new, refocused approach to GPU design, only to learn that they nearly threw out all of the learnings with the RV870. [/quote]
It sounds like they have had some successes trying different techniques, but without stability in their production process it is hard to repeat success. I understand that they require constant innovation to stay competitive, but throwing out whole processes seems chaotic to me. I would like them to refine and improve successful processes rather than toss everything every time a new business guru is in charge.
Also half of their effort was all about openness and collaboration. The opening up of the PRS document so that "everyone was involved in the process" seems to clash with the hyper-secret groups where "AMD has since incorporated much of Carrell's brand of information compartmentalization into how it handled other upcoming features." This seems like a recipe for disaster to me. Which is it, broad openness, collaboration and consesus; or secret teams that have no idea what the other teams are doing? Reply
SuperGee - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThe story told us that they didn't know it will become a succes because these desision where made before RV770 release. So doing the high risk choice again. Wasn't a nobrainer. But a risky choice. We know that it turn out good now. Reply
mckirkus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkIt's kind of funny that you're not yet running one of these companies yet Anand.
One of the reasons I check this site on a daily basis is because you also seem to also get the business side of the equation. It's downright refreshing to see someone bridging that gap. You pretty much saved the Vertex from self destruction. I'd like to see what interesting things you could build us if you put your mind to it. Reply
deputc26 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkArticles like these are what differentiate AnandTech from all the other sites out there. AnandTech goes from being one of the best review sites out there to something special.
Beyond excellent, thanks Anand. Reply
rickyv - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAs a loyal follower of your website for the past 15 years, I also felt that I just had to register and compliment you on an excellent article.
With the rapid advancement of technology, it is very easy just to get caught up in the PR and marketing hype or focus only on the numbers game. We often lose sight of the fact that it is teams of dedicated people who make this possible. You have always had the ability to bring out the "human" side to this. I have not seen this on any other site nor in printed form (that is not an unashamedly PR marketing exercise).
Thanks for staying true to your roots by giving honest opinions of the technology that you review. The latest releases are not necessarily always the greatest (as much as the marketing departments would like us to believe :-) ) Reply
krish123 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAfter i read the article, I found that "Engine is running well and firing on all the cylinders", It can create better products in the future, I can trust and buy ATI products, hope they deliver better products in the future for my upgrade.
"Kudos to Anand for the excellent article".
By the way graphics card is a product, not just hardware, it has to work in tandem with the software, its better ATI put some more effort on the driver/software side and fix all the issues.
Krish Reply
smartalec - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link"When companies like AMD and NVIDIA do a product the engineers don't know all of the answers, and the knowledge they do have isn't binary - it's probability, it's weight, it's guesses. Sometimes they guess right, and sometimes they guess very wrong. The best they can do is to all weigh in with their individual experiences and together come up with the best group of guesses to implement."
I'm afraid this is how all engineering works. Project managers think that engineers can predict the future. That we know exactly how much time it'll take, and how much risk a given feature will bring.
We don't. There's a lot of educated guesses. Sometimes we're pleasantly surprised that what we thought was a tough problem wasn't. Sometimes we're the bearer of bad news-- something we assumed would be trivial wasn't.
My most frustrating issues aren't technical at all. I ask for 2000 hours, and are given 1000. Or are given 2 engineers instead of 3, and told-- figure out a way to get it done anyway, without impacting schedule.
Great article Anand. Reply
mckirkus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAny decent project manager (I do software) reviews the risks up front with the engineers before building the project plan / timeline.
The fact that most project managers don't really understand the products they manage is the rule not the exception. The problem is that great engineers don't always make great PMs. Having a good tech lead helps. Reply
n7 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAnother great story told.
Thanx, Anand. Reply
MrK6 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkWhat a great piece. Thank you for taking the time to put this together; it's one of the best tech articles I've read. Reply
archcommus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkHaven't even read the whole thing yet but I can already say this is excellent. Thank you, Anand. Reply
indicator - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkHi all
I felt I had to register here after reading this article , what a fantastic insight into everything that goes into making these GPU's and the dedication and talent it takes to be so creative.
Great to see Anands enthusiasm for the industry come across in the article too
I've been coming here and reading Anandtech since around the mid ninties I guess , it is a superb source of information , I look forward to every new article/review posted.
Keep it up guys
(uk) Reply
d3x7r0 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkVery very good article as usual in this website. AnandTech has been one of my favourite sites in the area for so long I don't even remember how I found out about the website, I actually believe I was still in 56k when I first came here.
Anyway reading this article made me speculate on something (and please correct me if I'm wrong): If I got the timings right AMD-ATI should be working on the Northern Islands since the Radeon HD4xxx series days so the same issues they had with the HD5xxx series would be in the past. If this is true it means they know the HD4xxx were a success from the beginning of the process (or near it) and as such I can't but help it be even more excited to see what the next generation of ATI cards has in store.
It's such a good time to be an ATI fan it's not even funny :D Reply
Atlantis6000bc - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThose kind of article are the prime reason why I keep coming back to Anand....keep 'em coming
The13thWizard - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThanks Anand! Thats the best IT article Ive ever read! Very toughtfull and interesting! Reply
arnavvdesai - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkReally helps understand the industry a lot more. I really wish AMD would take a cue from its graphics division and really start hammering out what kind of chips do they want to build. However, they have their own set of challenges as Intel unlike NVIDIA is really really good on the foundry side as well.
However, with gaming becoming more and more centered on consoles, does ATi have something cooking for the next generation of consoles? Would love Anand to ask them something about that. Do they believe that they will continue to sell enough cards to continue recouping their costs of designing and manufacturing them. Reply
Vishnu Narayanan S - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkFirst of all, hats off to you for this amazing article.... Its these articles that bind us to the Anandtech website for years and years.
I sincerely hope and request you to provide similar in-depth and "behind the scenes" stories from NVIDIA and Intel. Just to satisfy the FANbois... lol Reply
fausto412 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkonce i started reading i couldn't stop. for a geek like me this was almost like sex:) keep them coming! Reply
devene - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkJust like many others, I've been a long time reader and I just couldn't carry on without leaving a comment:
This has been an article, just like the RV770 one. It may not reveal many facts but is tremendously insightful and inspiring. Thank you for bringing this deeply hidden information out to the public and to the "fans". Please do everything in your power to continue this trend.
Once again, thank you Anand,
devene Reply
medi01 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkGermans say "lange Rede kurzer Sinn". So many pointless sentences that do not tell anything even remotely interesting. Reply
TGressus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkEven the home team could not be sold on Eyefinity... Reply
William Gaatjes - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkFantastic article.
First, it massively increased the confidence level of the engineering team. There's this whole human nature aspect to everything in life, it comes with being human. Lose confidence and execution sucks, but if you are working towards a realistic set of goals then morale and confidence are both high. The side effect is that a passionate engineer will also work to try and beat those goals.
Finally, someone accepting and using human nature.
And see it works out...
The fun part is that a requested functionality that is desired but can not make it within the expected timeframe, can still be worked on and can be ready for the next "bulge" in the market. This way you relieve your engineers form stress, you have the time to sort errors and bugs out, you have time to solve unforseen consequences that always happen( people can get sick, a bug in software, machines breaking down) and you have a feature for the market department to market to the consumer for the next iteration of the product. This way you can use the free market to build an in the end perfect device. It is all about balance. If you have to invest to much energy in situation a, you will have less energy for situation b in a certain timeframe. We are bound by laws of nature meaning there is no "perpetuum mobile" in this universe. Nothing comes for free...
aegisofrime - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAnand, you have taken an article that is really technical in nature, and turned it into something entertaining to read and yet informative for non-engineer types. My hats off to you. This is really the right balance of information and readability. If only all the Scientific Papers I have to read were written like this! Reply
dukeariochofchaos - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linki wonder if you will give fermi the same drama queen touch?
i hope so.
Jamahl - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI don't think anyone wants to read nvidia's marketing department tell us how awesome PhysX and CUDA is again tbh. Reply
TGressus - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI suspect Fermi will be able to stand on it's technological innovation.
RJohnson - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link...and it's exorbitant price/die size will exclude mere mortals from owning one. Reply
Spoelie - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThat depends entirely on the openness of NVIDIA on the subject, historically not one of their strong points.
In fact ATi's take on NVIDIA's design process has been more informative than what has come out of NVIDIA itself.
But here's to hoping.. Reply
AdiQue - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI fully subscribe to point raised by a few previous posters. Namely, the article being such a worthy read, it actually justifies the creation of an account for the sheer reason of expressing appreciation to your fantastic work, which does stand out in the otherwise well saturated market of technology blogs. Reply
geok1ng - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link"I almost wonder if AMD's CPU team could learn from the graphics group's execution. I do hope that along with the ATI acquisition came the open mindedness to learn from one another"
it would be a true concern if based on mere observation, but the hard facts are soo much terrible: AMD fired tons of ATI personnel, hence ATI drivers are years behind NVIDIA- we are still begging for centered timings on ATO cards, a feature that NVIDIA offers 6 generations past! ATI produces cards that are gameless. DirectX 10.1?! There was a single game with DirectX 10.1 support, and NVIDIA made the game developer REMOVE DirectX 10.1 features with a game patch that "increased" performance. DirectX 11?! ATI has to put money on driver developing team and spend TONS of cash in game developing.
I would be a happier costumer if the raw performance of my 4870X2 was paired with the seamless driver experience of my previous 8800GT.
And another game that AMD was too late is the netbook and ultralow voltage mobile market. A company with the expertise in integrated graphics and HTPCs GPUs with ZERO market share on this segment?! give me a break! Reply
LordanSS - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkFunny... after the heaps of problems I had with drivers, stability and whatnot with my old 8800GTS (the original one, 320MB), I decided to switch to ATI with a 4870. Don't regret doing that.
My only gripe with my current 5870 is the drivers' and the stupid giant mouse cursor. The Catalyst 9.12 hotfix got rid of it, but it came back on the 10.1.... go figure. Other than that, haven't had problems with it and have been getting great performance. Reply
blackbrrd - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkI think the reason he had issues with the X2 is that it's a dual card. I think most gfx card driver problems comes from dual cards in any configuration (dual, crossfire, sli)
The reason you had issues with the 320mb card is that it had some real issues because of the half-memory. The 320mb cards where cards originally intended as gtx cards, but binned as gts cards that again got binned as 320mb cards instead of 640mb cards. Somehow Nvidia didn't test these cards good enough. Reply
RJohnson - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkPlease get back under your bridge troll... Reply
Warren21 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAre you kidding me? Become informed before you spread FUD like this. I've been able to choose centered timings in my CCC since I've had my 2900 Pro back in fall 2007. Even today on my CrossFire setup you can still use it.
As for your DX10.1 statement, thank NVIDIA for that. You must remember that THEY are the 600lb gorilla of the graphics industry - I fail to see how the exact instance you cite does anything other than prove just that.
As for the DX11 statement, if NVIDIA had it today I bet you'd be singing a different tune. The fact that it's here today is because of Microsoft's schedule which both ATI and NVIDIA follow. NV would have liked nothing more than to have Fermi out in 2009, believe that. Reply
Kjella - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link"AMD fired tons of ATI personnel, hence ATI drivers are years behind NVIDIA-"
Wow, you got it backwards. The old ATI drivers sucked horribly, they may not be great now either but whatever AMD did or didn't do the drivers have been getting better, not worse. Reply
Scali - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkIt's a shame that AMD doesn't have its driver department firing on all cylinders like the hardware department is.
The 5000-series are still plagued with various annoying bugs, such as the video playback issues you discovered, and the 'gray screen' bug under Windows 7.
Then there's OpenCL, which still hasn't made it into a release driver yet (while nVidia has been winning over many developers with Cuda and PhysX in the meantine, while also offering OpenCL support in release drivers, which support a wider set of features than AMD, and better performance).
And through the months that I've had my 5770 I've noticed various rendering glitches aswell, although most of them seem to have been solved with later driver updates.
And that's just the Windows side. Linux and OS X aren't doing all that great either. FreeBSD isn't even supported at all. Reply
hwhacker - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI don't log in and comment very often, but had to for this article.
Anand, these type of articles (Rv770,'Rv870',and SSD) are beyond awesome. I hope it continues for Northern Islands and beyond. Everything from the RV870 jar tidbit to the original die spec to the SunSpotting info. It's great that AMD/ATi allows you to report this information, and that you have the journalistic chops to inquire/write about it. Can not provide enough praise. I hope Kendell and his colleagues (like Henri Richard) continue this awesome 'engineering honesty' PR into the future. The more they share, within understandable reason, the more I believe a person can trust a company and therefore support it.
I love the little dropped hints BTW. Was R600 supposed to be 65nm but early TSMC problems cause it revert to 80nm like was rumored? Was Cypress originally planned as ~1920 shaders (2000?) with a 384-bit bus? Would sideport have helped the scaling issues with Hemlock? I don't know these answers, but the fact all of these things were indirectly addressed (without upsetting AMD) is great to see explored, as it affirms my belief I'm not the only one interested in them. It's great to learn the informed why, not just the unsubstantiated what.
If I may preemptively pose an inquiry, please ask whomever at AMD when NI is briefed if TSMC canceling their 32nm node and moving straight to 28nm had anything to do with redesigns of that chip. There are rumors it caused them to rethink what the largest chip should be, and perhaps revert back to what the original Cypress design (as hinted in this article?) for that chip, causing a delay from Q2-Q3 to Q3-Q4, not unlike the 30-45 day window you mention about redesigning Cypress. I wonder if NI was originally meant to be a straight shrink? Reply
hwhacker - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI meant Carrell above. Not quite sure why I wrote Kendell. Reply
papapapapapapapababy - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkOk, ok, great read, but i have to hate a bit, 1,2,3 GO! hey Carrell here is my top priority feature for your next PRS
1 -Drivers that dont suck ass-
"The performance was still a problem and the RV740 was mostly lost as a product" ...
the fuk? the 4770 is the BEST card i ever had, PERIOD. cheap, fast, cool, the perfect RV770, thanks !
bla bla Carrell "He's single handedly responsible for getting Eyefinity included in the Evergreen stack"
Meh? who gives a sht. , Carrell give me console like gpu scaling, so we can finally play crysis at 1080p, another one for that PRS
"Carrell went to David Glenn, head of software engineering at ATI and asked"
drivers that dont suck, please?
" There were also game compatibility concerns that made ATI not interested in the software approach"
Lol i wonder why? i think i know why. Hardware, hardware, what about the software,Carrell?
ok, thats it. not much to complain this time, flawless job ati guys
f0d - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linklong time reader/first time posting
ive never felt the need to post anything but with this article i really wanted to say:
"thank you"
the insights we get in these articles is amazing (i also read the first when it was done)
i like the "no technical or maketing bs" writing of this story and all the little pieces of information like with the eyefinity story and sideport
please do as much of these type of stories as possible - it must be difficult to talk to the right people and get the right information out of them and also be allowed to publish it but it makes a great read Reply
Robert Kooijman - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAwesome article Anand!
Also specially created an account to inform you how impressed I am with articles like these. A real treat these behind the scenes stories in non-marketing language. Keep 'm coming, compliments! Reply
- Friday, February 19, 2010 - linkbravo
when do the (tech industry) book's come out?? Reply
Kryten - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkInformative, interesting, inspirational, edifying and very well written. Here's hoping for more research and articles like this. Reply
greenguy - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkHi Anand, I've been reading your stuff for 3 years or so, I just created an account to tell you how awesome that article was. Very nice work. This sort of content is why I read Anandtech. (My other favorite articles have been the SSD articles and the i5-750 article.)
I especially like to hear about AMD/ATI - I like having a serious competitor to Intel out there, and I commend AMD for opening up their graphics card documentation. I hope that they continue to fund the Linux driver development (both open and closed source). I also hope their CPU division can put the heat on Intel again, especially on the low power front. Reply
at80eighty - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAnand I was just telling someone yesterday how I wish you guys got more popularity for the different approach you guys have
between articles like this and the new beta Bench tab - I think I'm really looking forward to your proposed changes you promised this year Reply
insurgent - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI had a really great time reading the article, thanks! Reply
Markstar - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAlso a big thank you from me for this wonderful article.
It's exactly these kind of stories that I hope to find here every morning when I start the day. Reply
JimmiG - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkWell the late changes would explain why the RV870 isn't "perfect" like the 770 was. At every price point except at the high-end, it delivers more features, but less or similar performance as the previous generation. For example the 5770 is slower than the 4870, the 5750 is about the same speed and price as the 4850 and so on. Also at the high-end it's more expensive than the 4800-series ever were - the 4870 was only $299 at launch, the 5870 is still at least $399. By this month in 2009, the 4870 was down to $249! Reply
Dudler - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkYour reasoning is wrong. The 57xx is a performance segment down from the 48xx segment. By your reasoning the 5450 should be quicker than the last gen 4870X2. The 5870 should be compared to the 4870, the 5850 to 4850 and so on.
Regarding price, the article sure covers it, the 40nm process was more expensive than TSMC told Amd, and the yield problems factored in too. Can't blame Amd for that can we?
And finally, don't count out that Fermi is absent to the party. Amd can charge higher prices when there is no competition. At the moment, the 5-series has a more or less monopoly in the market. Considering this, I find their prices quite fair. Don't forget nVidia launched their Gtx280 at $637.... Reply
JimmiG - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link"Your reasoning is wrong. The 57xx is a performance segment down from the 48xx segment. "
Well I compared the cards across generations based on price both at launch and how the price developed over time. The 5850 and 4850 are not in the same price segment of their respective generation. The 4850 launched at $199, the 5850 at $259 but quickly climbed to $299.
The 5770 launched at $159 and is now at $169, which is about the same as a 1GB 4870, which will perform better in DX9 and DX10. Model numbers are arbitrary and at the very best only useful for comparing cards within the same generation.
The 5k-series provide a lot of things, but certainly not value. This is the generation to skip unless you badly want to be the first to get DX11 or you're running a really old GPU. Reply
just4U - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkand they are still selling the 275,285 etc for a hefty chunk of change. I've often considered purchasing one but the price has never been right and mail in rebates are a "PASS" or "NO THANKS" for many of us rather then a incentive.
I haven't seen the mail-ins for AMD products much I hope their reading this and shy away from that sort of sales format. To many of us get the shaft and never recieve our rebates anyway. Reply
BelardA - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkAlso remind people... the current GTX 285 is about $400 and usually slower than the $300 5850. So ATI is NOT riping off people with their new DX11 products. And looking at the die-size drawings, the RV870 is a bit smaller than the GT200... and we all now that FERMI is going to be another HUGE chip.
The only disappointment is that the 5750 & 5770 are not faster than the 4850/70 which used to cost about $100~120 when inventory was good. Considering that the 5700 series GPUs are smaller... Hell, even the 4770 is faster than the 5670 and costs less. Hopefully this is just the cost of production.
But I think once the 5670 is down to $80~90 and the 5700s are $100~125 - they will be more popular.
coldpower27 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linknVidia made a conscious decision, not to fight the 5800 Series, with the GTX 200 in terms of a price war. Hence why their price remain poor value. They won't win using a large Gt200b die vs the 5800 smaller die.
Another note to keep in mind is that the 5700 Series, also have the detriment of being higher in price due to ATi moving the pricing scale backup a bit with the 5800 Series.
I guess a card that draws much less power then the 4800's, and is close to the performance of those cards is a decent win, just not completely amazing. Reply
MonkeyPaw - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkActually, the 4770 series was meant to be a suitable performance replacement for the 3870. By that scheme, the 5770 should have been comperable to the 4870. I think we just hit some diminishing returns from the 128bit GDDR5 bus. Reply
nafhan - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkIt's the shaders not the buswidth. Bandwidth is bandwidth however you accomplish it. The rv8xx shaders are slightly less powerful on one to one basis than the rv7xx shaders are. Reply
LtGoonRush - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThe point is that an R5770 has 128-bit GDDR5, compared to an R4870's 256-bit GDDR5. Memory clock speeds can't scale to make up the difference from cutting the memory bus in half, so overall the card is slower, even though it has higher compute performance on the GPU. The GPU just isn't getting data from the memory fast enough. Reply
Targon - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkBut you still have the issue of the 4870 being the high end from its generation, and trying to compare it to a mid-range card in the current generation. It generally takes more than one generation before the mid range of the new generation is able to beat the high end cards from a previous generation in terms of overall performance.
At this point, I think the 5830 is what competes with the 4870, or is it the 4890? In either case, it will take until the 6000 or 7000 series before we see a $100 card able to beat a 4890. Reply
coldpower27 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkYeah we haven't seen ATi/nVidia achieved the current gen mainstream faster then the last gen high end. Bandwidth issues are finally becoming apparent.
6600 GT > 5950 Ultra.
7600 GT > 6800 Ultra.
But the 8600 GTS, was only marginally faster then the 7600 GT and nowhere near 7900 GTX, it took the 8800 GTS 640 to beat the 7900 GTX completely, and the 800 GTS 320 beat it, in the large majority of scenarios, due to frame buffer limitation.
The 4770 slots somewhere between the 4830/4850. However, that card was way later then most of the 4000 series. Making it a decent bit faster then the 3870, which made more sense since the jump from 3870 to 4870 was huge, sometimes nearly even 2.5x could be seen nearly, given the right conditions.
4670 was the mainstream variant and it was, most of the performance of the 3800 Series, it doesn't beat it though, more like trades blows or is slower in general. Reply
wlee15 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThe USS Hornet is a carrier not a battleship.
For shame Anand For Shame! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkwow - you're totally right, I can't believe I made that mistake. Looks like Ryan or Jarred caught it shortly after it went live though, whew :)
And yes, for the record, I know the difference between an aircraft carrier and a battleship :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
just4U - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkLIES!!!!
(hah) Reply
Sahrin - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThank you - I was worried I'd be the only one to point this one out.
Thank you Anand! This stuff is incredible. Just a few weeks ago I was looking back on the RV770 article and wishing it could be done again.
Kudos as well are due to AMD's PR guys - for having the courage to let the engineers sit down with the press, instead of needing to be there as minders. I guarantee you that every single time, the same story told by a marketer of a product and by the guy whose passion created the product will be a thousand times more effectively conveyed by the engineer. Marketers have value - I'm not trying to write them off.
I don't know what I can do for AT and AMD to thank them for making articles like this happen. Aside from buying Cypress and being a reader - but if there is anything we can do to ensure these articles keep coming (bombard Meyer with Faxes?) let me be the first to sign up. (And maybe if we could get access to AMD's CPU guys as well, to provide a balance to the excellent information we get from Intel). Reply
Dianoda - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThis article was a real treat, keep 'em coming... Reply
dzx - Monday, February 22, 2010 - linkI created an account just to give thanks for such a well written, informative article. I can sense you have just as much passion for the technology as the engineers and architects who create it. Simply a pleasure to read. Reply
gralex - Friday, February 26, 2010 - linkThanx. I have nothing more to add that hasn't been said already in the above comments, just thanks.
As for ATI vs. NVIDIA, maybe i'm believing the hype but AMD seems awfully conservative at the moment. It's totally working for them, of course, but I'm liking the whole CUDA, Tegra2, Ion, Optimus momentum Nvidia might finally be gaining right now. Obviously they messed it up with a ton of rebranding making a 5xxx purchase a no-brainer right now... I just LOVE the way Nvidia was looking cornered and thought up a number of ways to get out. I hope these two keep up the healthy rivalry for many years to come, for ALL of us:-) Reply
phaxmohdem - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkWow. This was perhaps the first article I've read in a long time I read cover-to-cover, and couldn't put down. AT is my favorite tech review site, but I find myself reading the first two pages or so, skipping around to various benchmark pages, then reading the summary. This piece was remarkably intriguing and thought provoking. I look forward to the RV970 story, or perhaps better yet, the GF100 story.
Keep em coming! Reply
gimmeausername - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkDid you just say RV970?
I think you've just made some folks at AMD flip out by using that code name. :D Reply
coolhardware - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAs others have mentioned, articles like this one really put Anandtech head and shoulders above the competition. It is so very interesting to find out the real world story behind the video cards. What a wonderful Valentine's Day treat :-).
Thanks for all your hard work Anand, I really appreciate it! Reply
Dudler - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkWhoa... Just Whoa.
Very insightful and interesting.
Amd moving to GF next generation and Norther Islands this year?
Thx Anand :) Reply
carlhenry - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linki really loved the eyefinity being so 'mission impossible'. awesome article! Reply
Patrick Wolf - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkThe first rule of SunSpot: You don't talk about SunSpot. :D
mubeen - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkSuch an informative article Mr. Anand. Really appreciate your efforts. Reply
just4U - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - linkI agree it's a great article, nice to see these ones pop up from time to time. It don't really matter to me if it's nvidia, amd or intel.. just having a more insightful read is refreshing. Reply
DearSX - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI really do a like article like this. I wonder how old others are cause I'm 25 and I did not even notice how much reading things like this mattered. Its more important than buying something or performance figures imo. Reply
Paulman - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI, too, will second that. Really cool. :P Reply
MrSpadge - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkMany thanks for this interesting article and especially the in-dpeth information about TSMC, the process and how ATI deals with it. Thanks to you, Anand, for writing it and thanks to the good guys at AMD for sharing this information!
Beyond excellence :) Reply
hyvonen - Monday, February 15, 2010 - linkAnd NVidia's call for "zero defects, zero variability" was jaw-dropping. Do they have any idea how silicon is manufactured?
Unbelievable cluelessness... with this attitude, they are out of business in the next two years. They are completely unprepared to harness the potential in the latest process nodes.
Meanwhile, it also sounds like TSMC is way over its head in this - uncharacteristic screw-ups with the chamber matching, bad leakage etc. Not to mention the choice to delay HKMG until 28nm (and having to kill 32nm because of that). GF is going to eat them for lunch, and take over the foundry business.
ET - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkIndeed. One of the more interesting articles I've read in a while. Reply
cjb110 - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkAgreed, excellent article. Well written and informative, coverage of the other aspects of the industry is always welcome. Reply
Bull Dog - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - linkI'll second that. Articles like these are what differentiate AnandTech from all the other sites out there. AnandTech goes from being one of the best review sites out there to something special.
You have my heartfelt thanks Anand. Reply


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Laptop Graphics Face Off: Diablo III Performanceby Jarred Walton on 5/26/2012 4:25 AM EST
87 Comments
Back to Article
mepenete - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkThank you so much for this article. I'm looking to buy a new sub $500 laptop and was looking at the AMD A8 processors... and then the A10's got announced.
Regardless, I was curious of how they would stack up. Really helpful seeing how midrange equipment stacks. Looks like I'm gonna pick up an A10 laptop. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkHopefully prices come down a bit; right now the only A10-4600M laptops I can find are going for over $700. They're decent chips overall, but I'm not convinced they're better than a dual-core Sandy Bridge with GT 540M. The Acer I used is clearly not the best representative of that market, as the 13.3" chassis is quite thin and just can't cool the CPU+GPU well enough to avoid throttling; pretty much any 15.6" chassis should do better. Reply
frozentundra123456 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkIt seemed to me that the Llano laptops were marketed the same way. The A8 seemed to always be considerably more expensive than the A6 model, when the chips could not be that much different in cost. However, the A8 was usually better equipped with more ram. Reply
JKnows - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkPretty cool from A10-4600M to providing the same performance as Sandy Bridge with GT 540M for half energy consumption. Is it two weeks after Trinity's launch? Too bad still not possible to find these laptops. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 02, 2012 - linkRight and the price is not going to be nice, so later in here a GT540 optimus laptop is recommended with a link by the author. $599 MC, $679 egg.
So long gone is the hope the A10 comes in a cheap $350 or $400 walmart special like the (low end) brazos.
If amd is going to charge high prices for their cheapo chip, the rest of the laptop had better be awesome not some plastic creaking crud - and the screen had better be good.
I think what we'll see instead is junky cheap builds that cost a lot. Reply
QuantumPion - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - linkI got the Acer laptop with the core i5 and GT540M at newegg for $499 last year. That or a similar model would probably be a better bet. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 02, 2012 - linkWell that was a find, still hard to get at that price. Reply
narlzac85 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkFor people planning to play into Hell or Inferno difficulties. Be aware that elite monster packs will have 3 magical abilities on Hell and 4 on Inferno. You could also run into two or more packs of monsters at once, so you could be looking at 6, 8 or more magical effects. Also, some of the monster abilities cause them to replicate. I've definitely seen 30 or more monsters at once with the entire screen covered with fire, poison and lightning.
I don't play on a laptop or use an IGP, but I assume this could have negative impact on performance. Normal mode and even Nightmare mode would probably not be too bad though. Reply
cjb110 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI guess this is where the Low FX setting will be most useful then.
Certainly a play through on normal doesn't seem to really get worse near the end...on average the mob size is slightly bigger, but that's about it.
Co-op would be another interesting test, that's probably the most demanding that the graphics would get. Reply
Herald85 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI'm in Nightmare Act 4 and in the Keep (Tristram equivalent, the homebase) I get over 100fps. Taking on average mobs outside the Arreat Gate drops fps to 80. And that's on a 6950 , 1900x1200 everything maxed.
On my laptop with a 8600m GT I could play fine in Normal until I got to Act4. I can still play but it's annoyingly choppy when there are lots of mobs. The 8600m GT is mentioned as supported 'Low' on the Bliz site.
I would LOVE to see a review done on Hell. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkProblem is, to test on Hell I have to play through all of Normal, then all of Nightmare. I know people who have already done that, sure, but I only got the game two days ago and I have a family and a life outside of playing games. Hence the disclaimer at the beginning. I'll update the text to mention slowdowns on later areas. Reply
kmmatney - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkCan you use someone else's save file? Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkNot that I know of; everything is stored on Blizzard's servers. The only way to access your characters is to login to Battle.net. Reply
Herald85 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkIf you want, you can use my account to test. You'll need to sign a contract I receive that MSI laptop if you abuse my account.
Seriously though, I wouldn't mind you using my account (the greater good and all that). Only problem I see is I'm playing on Europe servers so the lag might spoil testing. Reply
shank15217 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkThere is a basic reason why the game runs so well in Act 1 Normal.. play through Act 3 Hell then come back and redo your review. Only the 650M has a chance of playable frame rates in those levels and we haven't even covered multi-player. My 7870 OC to 1100 Mhz has some slowdowns in those levels under some high stress scenarios and basically the game becomes an absolute nut-fest in later difficulties. People will want to play through the later difficulties, its part of the game's progression. Now I get that its hard to benchmark through the randomness but you can make subjective comparisons or do several run throughs. I can say with absolute certainty, none of the apus have a chance in playable frame rates in scenarios where it will matter. D3 is a very unforgiving game, it can take a split second to die, smooth frame rates in non-normal difficulties is essential. Reply
dingetje - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - link+1 on that ! Reply
snakefist - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkagreed, act1 is much less demanding
did the test included multiplayer? game staggers when more than one player is in game on some configurations, while it's totally smooth in single player...
also, memory usage tends to increase greatly in later acts, may hurt performance if memory is shared.... Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkTell you what, guys: email me your account login and password and don't play the game for a day, and give me instructions on a good stressful area to play on Hell difficulty, and then I can test that area. Otherwise, I simply don't have the 40+ hours needed to get to that point in the game in less than a week.
And in case it's not clear, I'm mostly joking here. I've got several items I'm working on reviewing that are going to be higher priority than revisiting Diablo III performance in later acts. Perhaps this summer I'll have a chance to go back, but by then it won't really matter that much. So I'd suggest taking these figures as a way of getting relative performance from the various GPUs/IGPs, and then extrapolate from there. If you need to play on Hell difficulty on a laptop with maximum details enabled, you're probably going to want at least a GK107 dGPU (or perhaps Southern Islands). Reply
dingetje - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linklol ;) Reply
snakefist - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkhehe, but it's not that hard - you don't even have to be on higher level difficulties - its only ACT 1 OF NORMAL, which is more like a tutorial and considerably less populated (and task manager is claiming ~300mb ram, which increases up to 1gb later, still on normal)
all the things mentioned later, like having freezing monsters or duplicates or 100+ creeps on screen are happening on nightmare also, and even on late normal, so it shouldn't be that kind of bother...
on account topic user/password, use freejack/demise001xp, that's mine :)
(joking of course, but you could give me YOUR user/password and authenticate it with one of those mobile apps while on chat, and i could level you up pretty fast, playing since diablo1. being on normal, you don't have much to lose, i'll even leave you some nice gear to start nightmare with - seriously, talking about few hours job)
and all is in good-faith, since i don't play d3 on laptop anyway :) Reply
DanNeely - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkAll joking about account sharing not withstanding, would AT buying a new D3 account for testing and letting a volunteer (not me) level it up for late game/hell testing be a viable option? Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkWe do have a couple people playing the game, so at some point we'll be able to test later levels. Give me a chance to: A) have a holiday (today), B) write a few other articles, C) enjoy the game without more benchmarking of it (which totally kills the fun!). Probably in a week or so I can come back with results from Act II or later.
Unless you can talk Anand into your idea? ;-) Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - linkMy diplomacy skills are of the Europe 1914 level; the odds of my being able to sweet talk someone I don't know well into anything are slim to none.
Better results in a week or so isn't that bad a delay. I'm just mildly frustrated since I've had a few people ask what sort of hardware they needed to play the game; and it seems that all the numbers I can find are from very early in the game and thus non-representative of what's really needed. Reply
damianrobertjones - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI'm hoping that Windows 8 Metro games bring a stable platform and for once I'm glad that at we'll at least have HD4000 as a base platform. Reply
dagamer34 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI'm wondering how the HD 4000 compares to the GPUs in ARM SoCs as that will be the actual low mark if slower. Reply
tipoo - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI'm curious about that as well, SoC GPUs like the SGX 543MP4 are getting pretty complex and Intel themselves used to use integrated PowerVR GPUs in their chipsets. Reply
tipoo - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkThe GMA 3600 is based on the PowerVR SGX545. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkAnd the Windows drivers for it are crap right now. I'm just saying.... Reply
Penti - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkActually Metro/WinRT won't be used for gaming, If you want a restricted environment there already is XNA so. Games will be too difficult and too less of an incentive or anything to gain to port to the WinRT framework. Or Windows Runtime as they call it. Game developers will never target Metro/WinRT if they don't have to and they don't on x86 machines, desktop is there, you can still build for Windows 7 etc where most users are and so on. Won't happen that much here until next gen consoles either. Plus macs have gotten a whole lot better in the department and plenty of game engines are available now. Taking those kind of engines and porting to C++/WinRT isn't something taken lightly it probably won't actually be possible without a rewrite which defeats the purpose. The performance wouldn't be good. The sandbox is probably too restrictive. It also means in practice it is a more restrictive environment then the mobile sandboxed OS's, several mobile OS's run Firefox for example. WinRT never will. WinRT never will run even IE. Reply
oopyseohs - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkDid I miss the part where you talk about using an external monitor, or how else were you able to run all of these GPUs at all three resolutions? I'm not saying the data isn't important, as it could be relevant to different notebooks that use the same or similar hardware just with higher-res screens.
Also, I've played this game on an old desktop with with GTX 285 @ 1080p and everything turned up. While that is fairly smooth and playable, I still get quite a few moments of "stuttering" in Hell difficulty. I also play on basically the same Acer book with the GT 540M, and even at the lowest possible graphics settings and resolution in normal mode, it's hard for me to characterize that performance as anything other than horrible in comparison to the desktop. Reply
JarredWalton - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkYes, all of the higher than 1366x768 results were done on an external LCD where required (which was the case for Llano, Trinity, VAIO C, TimelineX, and Vostro; the other laptops had 1080p displays, except for quad-core SNB which has a 1600x900 LCD and I didn't run the 1080p tests). Reply
PolarisOrbit - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkGood review for what it is, but I think it could have been a little more complete with some additional information:
1) Use Act 3 Bastion's Keep for the "intensive" case instead of Act 1 Old Town. I think this would be better representative of the game's peak demand. (probably just a run through of the signal fires quest since it's easy to get to)
2) Include a brief section on how much of an impact additional players put on the game. I find it can actually be quite significant. This doesn't have to be full-depth review just a quick.
Overall, I'm using an A8-3500M + 6750M crossfire (overclocked to 2.2GHz) @1366x768 and my framerates during battles (ie. when it counts) average about 1/2 to 1/3 what the reviewer posts because the game gets much more intensive than Act 1, and having a party also slows it down significantly compared to solo.
Just some ideas to expand the review if you want =) Reply
drkrieger - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkHey folks, I've got an older Asus G71Gx which has a Nvidia GTX260M, I can play it on medium/low at about 40 fps @ 1920x1200.
Hope this gives some idea of older mobile graphics stack up. Reply
waldojim42 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI have been testing this out on my W520 for the sake of seeing what I can do to play diablo and maintain decent battery life.
For what it is worth, turning off shadows, and playing @ 1366x768 on the HD 3000 results in roughly 28fps - more than enough to play the game through the first difficulty anyhow. I have been using this for some time now with 4 players in game. When running @ 1080P, it dips down into the low 20's, and occasionally is a problem in act 3 so I wouldn't suggest it.
Point is though, that anyone that has a notebook with SB and no video card CAN still play this game, even if it isn't ideal. Reply
Zoolookuk - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkGiven this is a cross platform game, it would have been interesting to provide Mac results with similar hardware. I play using a GT330m and i7 dual core, and it runs pretty well. I'd like to see how it stacks up to the latest AMD chips and HD3000 on a Mac. Reply
egtx - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkYes I am interested in Mac results as well. Reply
ananduser - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkProvided the testing is done on a dual booting Apple machine, D3 under Windows will always run better. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkAnecdotally, Brian and Anand have both commented that Diablo 3 on a MacBook Pro under OS X runs like crap. I'm not sure if they're running on latest generation MBP13 or something else, though, so that's about all I can pass along. Reply
ananduser - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkWas there any doubt? OSX is severely lacking in the graphical driver support. Apple never gave a rat's rear about this crucial aspect of gaming support. They are always late with drivers and with the latest OpenGL spec. Reply
Penti - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - linkThe recommendations / minimum requirements on Macs are discrete graphics with good drivers though. I.e. no nvidia 7300 / 7600, ATi X1600 / X1900 etc. Starting point is 8600 GT. Obviously no integrated Intel graphics is enough there. OpenGL3.2 or OpenGL 2.1 with extensions should be fine for game developers and the drivers handle it, nVidia and AMD can put in performance improvements if they have the feedback. They could even launch their own "game edition" card for the Mac Pro with their own drivers outside of Apples distribution channel. Nvidia releases drivers on there site from time to time. That said both the game engine port and drivers are a bit less optimized then their Windows and Direct3D counterpart. They [drivers] are quiet robust and well working but might not be that fast. It's mainly a problem for the developers today though as most macs has somewhat decent graphics with maintained drivers and have pretty good driver support and support pretty much all the features you need any way.
The OS is very dependent on OGL so the support it self is decent and fairly up to to date even if it is not OpenGL 4.2/3.3 yet. Latest OpenGL 4.2 is not even supported by much of any hardware that Apples uses either so. R700, R600, GF 8M, GF 9M and the desktop versions does not support more then OpenGL 3.3 any way which it self is a backport of as much as possible. 3.2 is a decent level there. Apple always support the whole API in the software renderer too so they have no joy hunting the latest features, though the vendors can use any extensions they wish to add those features, all the supported gpus supports the API too. Intel drivers on Windows do not have OpenGL 4.1/4.2 drivers. It's a lot better driver support then for say Intel graphics on Linux and in some regards even on Windows. Intel drivers on Windows don't support OpenGL 3.2 yet. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, June 01, 2012 - linkAnand commented to me the other day that "Windows HD 4000 results are faster than MBP15 with dGPU results", if that's anything to go by. Reply
Patflute - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - link... Reply
DanNeely - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkSome people are severely space limited; others are casual gamers and don't play enough to justify having two computers. As a very mass market game; DIII will be selling a huge number of copies to people in the latter group. Reply
kyuu - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkMany people have both laptops and desktops, and regardless of the desktop obviously being superior for gaming, they'd still like to be able to game a bit on their laptop when they're out and about and don't have access to their desktop.
Then, there are people who don't have the space for a desktop, or simply prefer the freedom of being able to move around their home but would still like to play games.
The question is, why do other people's usage models bother you so much? You don't care about the gaming ability of laptops. Fine. Don't pay attention to articles about it. Meanwhile, there are plenty of others, such as myself, who are highly interested. Reply
frozentundra123456 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI am confused about the GT540M vs the GT630M. Isnt the GT630m just a re-badged GT540m with higher clocks? Or is it the new G-force architecture? I believe only the 640M and above have the new architecture. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkThe GT 630M is technically a straight up rebadge of GT 540M. However, the GT 630M in the ASUS N56VM that we have shows clocks that are quite a bit lower than other GT 540M GPUs. Strangely, those lowered clocks don't appear to matter much in Diablo III, so either NVIDIA's control panel (and GPU-Z) are reporting incorrect information, or the shader cores aren't as demanding as you might expect. Reply
frozentundra123456 - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkYou did say the acer was running hot. Maybe the cpu/gpu was throttling due to temps. Or maybe the quad core in the Acer made a difference (not likely?). Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkCorrect. The Acer is definitely not hitting Turbo speeds, let along the base 2.3GHz clock. So the combination of faster CPU + slower GPU works out in favor of the N56VM in this instance. I really wish I had a good way to test the N56VM with the fully clocked GT 540M, though. Reply
Arcquist - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkGoogle 'ThrottleStop'. Many of the Acer Aspire users that experience throttling problems in games use it to prevent the under-clocking. Note it will get hot though and you might want to raise the back of the laptop off the desk with a binder or something to improve airflow (intake). Reply
JarredWalton - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkFunny enough, I actually reran tests with ThrottleStop already and it just didn't seem to help. I'm not sure what's going on, but even with TS enabled and set to a 20x (or 21, 22, 23, Turbo) multiplier, the system still seems to just plug along at the 800-1500MHz range during testing. I've done everything I know of to make it run faster, and it just doesn't seem to matter. But this particular laptop has always been a bit quirky; I might try looking for a new BIOS again just to see if anything has changed, but I doubt it. Reply
JarredWalton - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkAnd funny enough, after additional investigation, the issue isn't throttling on the Acer but rather a higher clock on the GT 630M compared to the GT 540M. NVIDIA's updated specs page for the 630M lists 800MHz as the clock, but oddly their control panel is only reporting 475MHz on the ASUS. According to GPU-Z's Sensors tab, however, it really is running an ~800MHz core clock (1600MHz shaders), which accounts for the higher performance compared to the 672MHz GT 540M. I've updated the text in the article to explain this. Reply
ananduser - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkSuddenly those fancy expensive ultrabooks(Apple or otherwise) seem like extremely poor deals for tech enthusiasts. Then again they were always aimed at bloggers. Reply
DanNeely - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - link... and enthusiasts who want an ultra portable that's a PC not a fondleslab, and which is faster than an atom. Reply
ananduser - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkNo offense, enthusiasts(in the real sense of the word) are always more extreme than your average MBA wielding blogger. If they wanted something light they would spare no expense and would have gone with a VaioZ, or some crazy Japanese Fujitsu that is lithium made, or a moded Sony UX. PC hardware enthusiasm has nothing to do with Apple commodities that try to be as "safe" as possible. Reply
Impulses - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkSuddenly? They were never marketed as gaming rigs, most don't even have dGPUs and Diablo 3 isn't even one of the 5 most demanding games this year. I dunno what you're getting at, ultrabooks are still great for the propose they're meant for. Can you get just as much done with an uglier/thicker/heavier $700 laptop? Sure, you might even get a dedicated GPU to go along with it... They're serving entirely different markets tho. Reply
ananduser - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkWhich is why I mentioned tech enthusiasts in my original comment. There's nothing that I dispute from your enumeration. Reply
futurepastnow - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkOr, perhaps I should say, a concern. You increase the detail setting and the resolution together.
What about 1366x768 at high detail? Or 1920x1080 at low detail? Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI have to stick to a subset of the possible resolution/detail settings or I'd be testing a single game 24/7 for a week. I've already spent probably 20 hours benchmarking Diablo III, and let me tell you: running the same three minute sequence at least a dozen times per laptop gets to be mighty damn tedious. I did run tests at some other settings, which I commented on I believe, but here's a bit more detail.
For example, on the N56VM, 1080p with all settings maxed but Shadow Quality set to Low results in performance of 20.1 FPS/18.5 FPS for our test sequences -- so that one setting boosted performance by over 50% compared to having all settings at High/Max. What's more, I also tested at max detail 1080p but with Shadow Quality set to Off, and the scores are 27.1/24.8 -- another 35% improvement over Low shadows. Everything else combined (e.g. 1080p but all other settings at low) only accounts for probably 20%. I could test that as well if you really want, but I have other things to do right now. Reply
futurepastnow - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI'm mostly thinking that a large majority of laptops sold, even now, have 1366x768 displays. It looks like all of the non-Intel laptops handle playable framerates with low detail at that resolution, so I'm curious how that performance falls as the detail goes up.
In particular, can Llano and Trinity handle high detail at 1366x768? They are (or will be) sold in budget laptops that won't get high-res screens.
However, I understand the time constraints your working under. Thanks for the comparison, anyway. Reply
kyuu - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkI agree with this. I understand time constraints, but honestly, the paradigm that's being followed here (and with a lot of reviews) is simply not representative of real-world usage. It's not the case that people play with low details at low resolutions and high details at high resolutions. *Especially* when you're dealing with laptops. Generally, you're going to have the resolution at the display's native resolution, and going to work with the settings from there.
In any case, the article is still appreciated, and it's possible, at least, to make an educated guess at how the game will run at various resolutions and settings based on the presented info. Definitely going to grab myself a nice Trinity-powered laptop soon as one meeting my desired specs comes out.
Also, yet again we see that HD4000 does not match Llano, let alone exceed it, as I've seen some people spreading around. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkThis is the whole purpose of having three different settings, discussing what settings we selected and why, etc. Consider the Value setting a "near-best-case" result while still looking decent; in this case, the only thing you can really do to further improve frame rates is to turn off shadows and/or lower the resolution further. If you look at our Mainstream results, you can see what happens as you start to turn up the dials, and the same goes for Enthusiast. I've discussed in the article exactly how much the various elements impact performance, going so far as to include additional results at "Enthusiast 1080p" but with Shadow Quality on Low/Off.
If someone can't get at least a decent idea of where to start in terms of settings and what to expect from their laptop hardware with the information in this article, I'm not sure what I could do to help the situation. Hold their hand and walk through each and every specific setting? Because that tends to come off sounding very condescending if I write that way, and I think most people who care enough to read our articles are much smarter than that. Reply
kyuu - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkFair enough, I understand that. However, I'm not suggesting you write in a hand-holding, condescending manner. Just having three bars on the graph for each resolution (one bar for value, mainstream, and enthusiast settings) would be fine. I understand the time constraints, though, as I said. That would be the ideal, however. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 02, 2012 - linkYou won't have to worry about that soon for nVidia chipped laptops as nVidia is rolling out that automatic best game play settings in their drivers.
That's going to be a wonderful thing for the majority of gamers and laptop users who don't have a clue on game settings - I hope it helps increase the user base so computer games overall gain strength.
Amd needs to follow suit quickly, to help all of us with a larger user base, instead of being stupid and lame on the driver side as usual. Of course, I'm scowling at the idea amd could possibly man up in that area. Reply
gamoniac - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkEven though HD4000 is barely playable, I am still impressed by how far Intel has come along. HD4000 is right on the heel of HD6620G, which I didn't expect to happen just 1.5 years ago. Reply
geogerf - Saturday, May 26, 2012 - linkWhere's the Alienware laptop comparisons...? I have a M17X R3 6900M and D3 is pretty smooth (sorry didn't download FRAPs yet), but I'd like to see some official numbers.
Thanks! Reply
erple2 - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkJust as soon as that Alienware laptop comes down in price to sub $700 prices, it'll show up on this comparo!
Oh, it's not that much in retail? I guess that your Alienware doesn't qualify as a "mainstream" laptop, like these other ones. Reply
geogerf - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkSorry, I don't get your sarcasm.. where does it say in the article that these are only sub $700 laptops tested?
I'd think Alienware would fit under a "Enthusiast" machine, being gamer oriented and all... Reply
Alchemist07 - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkI think the ASUS laptop is $1300 or so (was reviewed recently iirc) Reply
designerfx - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - linkhigher levels get substantially more performance impacting.
I'm using a HD 6970 at 1920x1200 with 6 gigs of ram and and an i7 920 and by hell difficulty I've encountered packs of mobs that have brought my machine to it's knees (sub 15FPS).
Blizzard really needs to work on whatever they did poorly with for othis game. Reply
Zingam - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkShut the F up and lower that resolution! Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 02, 2012 - linkThanks for that bit of info, ignore the fanboy, and continue your observations please - as we have already been told in the last card reviews by so many users here they have 1900X1200 monitors and they are by no means rare and "all real enthusiasts" have sought them.
So the information you have there is very valuable to all the amd fans that own their 1900X1200 here that only lost to the new nVidia flagship by 9% at that resolution instead of 14% overall loss at 1920X1080, which anand doesn't show.
Please ignore the sniping, cursing rude person and continue the observations as that one surprised me. Reply
Sabresiberian - Sunday, May 27, 2012 - link"What that means is cutting edge technologies like DirectX 11 aren't part of the game plan; in fact, just like StarCraft II and World of WarCraft, DirectX 10 isn't in the picture either. Diablo III is a DirectX 9 title, and there should be plenty of GPUs that can handle the game at low to moderate detail settings."
WoW got a major graphics upgrade for the expansion pack Cataclysm, and it is now one of the few DX11 capable MMOGs released. You're overall point is valid in that Blizzard makes games so that people with lower priced systems can play them, but a bit out-of-date when it comes to WoW.
;) Reply
iwod - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkAnyone old enough would have remember those article about Mobile Graphics, How they sucks, how every year we were suppose to get 50 - 100% performance improvement. How Quake 3 didn't work, we could only play SimCity 2000.
And by todays standard, Diablo 3 isn't even ground breaking in terms of Graphics. And yet, most of these laptop dont even play the game at acceptable frame rate ( 30fps ), ( And we are already excluding ANY of the ACT 3 / 4 loads in the game )
And we even have Retina Display resolution coming. We are talking about 2 - 4x Pixel Density.
I really do hope Haswell will provide 3x the performance of Top HD4000 numbers. This way we could push and ensure that everytime i select a discrete graphics in Notebook, i am guarantee to get at least decent graphics performance numbers. Reply
Zingam - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkEver heard about heat and battery life. Laptops are not for games! They actually do run games good when they are 5+ years older than the laptop itself. :)
So play old games and be happy and they are mostly better than the current breed of graphic intensive crap. Reply
Zingam - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkBTW That's the reason why consoles are better than PCs for gaming. You invest once and it guarantees you (unless it is XBOX 360 and rings red of death) that you will be able to play all available games until you have it. For the price of a console you cannot even buy a good graphics card. Reply
iwod - Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - linkYes, but Diablo 3 is exactly like a game 3 - 5 years older then my current laptop ( 6 months old ) with 6630M.
We have Laptop as Desktop Replacement. But most of those dont even run the game well.
And exactly like you said consoles are MUCH better for gaming. Which leads me to think we are getting less efficient in extracting performance out of GPU. Reply
Computex - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkI would use it for school since I can afford something like this on my own......... Reply
amanstay - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linki wanna play D3 with laptop, what suitable laptop and what is the requirements that i need? pls help me.. Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkWhat's your intended resolution and what level of detail are you willing to run at? If you're okay with 1366x768 and Low Shadow Quality, you should be able to play through at least Normal and Nightmare difficulty on any Llano, Trinity, or possibly (if you're tolerant) HD 4000 laptop. If you want higher quality settings or a higher resolution, you'll want probably something with at least a GT 630M level GPU.
Best bang for the buck right now, I'd go with the Acer AS4830TG: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results....
It's a bit larger (and should therefor run a bit cooler/better) than the 3830TG used in the benchmarks for this article. At a price of $600, I don't see Trinity A10 surpassing it any time soon, though I do suspect the number of 4830TG units currently available is all that's left, so they might go out of stock in the next month or so. Reply
Dark_Archonis - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkFirst thing is first, Acers are horrible laptops.
Secondly, many gamers now are on laptops, not by choice, but some by necessity. There are quite a few gamers that are, in fact, space-limited and simply don't have the space for a full desktop setup. I am actually one of those at the moment. I will have more space in the future, where I will then get a desktop, but I don't have enough space right now. That is why a laptop is ideal for me. Secondly, a laptop has almost everything integrated and makes it easy to be mobile; speakers, trackpad, keyboard, screen are all in one unit. You can't be lugging around a desktop everywhere. If you're going to a friend's house or visiting somewhere, a laptop allows you to game on the go.
Lastly, laptops are all about cooling. An Acer that's throttling is not going to cut it. The Act 1 benchmarks are not realistic. In Act 3 or 4 with tons of mobs on screen, that will stress both the CPU and GPU a lot more. A properly cooled and properly designed laptop should be hitting max turbo speeds almost always, and should not be throttling at all. Properly cooled the laptop should be running at minimum on base clocks when hooked to the A/C adapter. If you're gaming on the battery, than that's a bad idea. Gaming should be done hooked up the adapter when possible.
With an i5 or i7 hitting max turbo clocks, combined with a 540M or 630M Geforce, D3 should run smoothly at medium/high settings even in Act 3 or 4. If your laptop is throttling, then of course that's a different story. So in the end, it is possible to game pretty well on a laptop, as long as the laptop has strong cooling. Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkYou'll note that with further investigation into the performance, it does not appear that the Acer is throttling. It simply isn't hitting max turbo during testing because the game doesn't require it. The performance of the much faster CPU in the N56VM is never more than 20% faster than the Acer, and that accounts for the GPU clock speed difference.
As for later acts, give us a bit of time and we'll return to the benchmarks with results from late in the game. We have some other stuff that's higher priority, but we are aware of the fact that the Act I numbers are not fully representative of Diablo III performance. It will probably be a couple weeks, though. Reply
tacosRcool - Monday, May 28, 2012 - linkPretty decent review, I wish more cards could be tested tho Reply
slagar - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link"... is making plenty of news, and we managed to get a copy for testing purposes."
Nice try, Jarred ;) Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, June 01, 2012 - linkHey, it pays to work in the industry. One of our hardware contacts managed to get me a code -- actually had to buy a box, open it up, photograph the key, and email that to me. Hahahaha... Something about the address on my Battle.net account not matching the billing address for the CC, so that was just easier than trying to figure it out. Thank goodness for that as well, as there's no way my wife (with a newborn) would be letting me buy Diablo III. Reply
justsomedude84 - Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - linkWell, just to give some perspective on the low end laptops, I try and play D3 on a HD3200 & 2ghz dual core AMD, and its pretty horrible most of the time. I even have it set to 800x600! and get about 10-20fps... Im looking for a better, but inexpensive upgrade. I have a q6600 & HD4870 desktop that runs the game pretty well with all setting low or off at the highest resolution and it looks great and runs ok. Im wanting to get a laptop with a 6750M... Reply
justsomedude84 - Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - linkBTW, Iv managed to get to Hell act 1 all myself... lol. (mostly on my desktop, but have to do most of my gaming at work) Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, June 01, 2012 - linkHD 3200 is sadly very old by today's standards; it's actually not much better than Intel's Arrandale HD Graphics (original Core i3/i5 dual-core laptops). HD 3200 was fine when it came out in early 2008, but then AMD didn't release a significant update (just similarly clocked HD 4200/4250/4290) until the launch of Llano last June. That's over three years without a real improvement in IGP performance, which is pretty much an eternity for GPUs. Reply