Have integrated solutions stagnated?

[silikone]

As my GPU died, I went back to using my Intel HD 530, which is surprisingly capable in some games.

Checking up on how it stacks up against others, I noticed that there have not been many improvements on the Intel HD side of things. On paper, the differences are minimal, if not completely absent. Only with the upcoming Ice Lake does it seem like we are finally seeing a leap, and a big one at that.

Yeah, this is a rather moot subject to talk about, but I am personally fascinated by low-spec gaming, as it is very relevant to budget laptop gaming.

[WereCatf]

14 minutes ago, silikone said:

Only with the upcoming Ice Lake does it seem like we are finally seeing a leap, and a big one at that.

So, they aren't stagnated? Well, you answered your own question, then!

 

Besides, you say nothing about AMD -- they've been pushing a lot more powerful iGPUs than Intel for a while already.

[silikone]

19 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

So, they aren't stagnated? Well, you answered your own question, then!

Sure, but my point is that it is still a product of the future. In the here and now, Skylake is still the last notable release, and it's like, four years old now? As it is now, a 13 year old 8800 GTX can still beat out the puny silicon included with almost every mid-tier CPU of today.

Yeah, I neglected AMD, mostly because I have zero experience with their iGPU's, which is quite telling of the unfortunate positions on the market.

[vanished]

45 minutes ago, silikone said:

Sure, but my point is that it is still a product of the future. In the here and now, Skylake is still the last notable release, and it's like, four years old now? As it is now, a 13 year old 8800 GTX can still beat out the puny silicon included with almost every mid-tier CPU of today.

Yeah, I neglected AMD, mostly because I have zero experience with their iGPU's, which is quite telling of the unfortunate positions on the market.

I don't think that's true, even mid-tier iGPUs these days are better than the top cards from back then.  Last time I had a look at this, it seemed like it took roughly 7 years for Intel's top iGPU to match the GeForce *80 Ti (or equivalent) card of the day.

[GoldenLag]

50 minutes ago, silikone said:

Yeah, I neglected AMD, mostly because I have zero experience with their iGPU's, which is quite telling of the unfortunate positions on the market.

yeah........ intel is having a really hard time. they cant yield 10nm while throwing out hot messes known as CPUs. 

[BigRom]

Vega 11 iGPU (performance roughly equal to a GTX750) right now...

 

Spoiler

 

[silikone]

34 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I don't think that's true, even mid-tier iGPUs these days are better than the top cards from back then.  Last time I had a look at this, it seemed like it took roughly 7 years for Intel's top iGPU to match the GeForce *80 Ti (or equivalent) card of the day.

I may need to test this one day, but there are many old games struggling on my HD 530 that I ran perfectly fine on my 8800 a long time ago.

Granted, being a modern D3D11-compliant chip, Intel does have an edge in practice, and direct comparisons between them are not honest. It is obviously held back by the slow memory.

[FlimFlam]

If they have stagnated, then good. Integrated GPUs are the devil. Complete waste of CPU die space. I can't remember the time when I didn't have a dedicated GPU.

[Arika]

22 minutes ago, FlimFlam said:

If they have stagnated, then good. Integrated GPUs are the devil. Complete waste of CPU die space. I can't remember the time when I didn't have a dedicated GPU.

not everyone needs a dGPU... there are magnitudes more devices out there running on an iGPU vs a dGPU, business computers and laptops being the most notable.

Intel has the largest GPU market share. so while YOU might deem it a waste, the market would show that you are indeed incorrect.

[FlimFlam]

16 hours ago, Arika S said:

not everyone needs a dGPU... there are magnitudes more devices out there running on an iGPU vs a dGPU, business computers and laptops being the most notable.

Intel has the largest GPU market share. so while YOU might deem it a waste, the market would show that you are indeed incorrect.

The market is wrong. But first let me concede that iGPUs are critical in smartphones and useful in laptops. I was talking about desktops.

 

The problem is this: Space is at a premium inside the CPU, but is many orders of magnitude more available in the rest of the case. This is even true in 'slim' form factor cases. Some dGPUs are extremely tiny and don't even need a PCIe x16 slot. The space currently taken up by iGPUs is very much more useful as part of the main processing units, and a dGPU could replace the iGPU at any price point, and in any form-factor case. I am absolutely certain that is the better way to design them. I will say that, perhaps, a very minimalistic (and much much smaller) iGPU is useful for troubleshooting. But Intel and AMD should stop wasting space trying to make iGPUs competitive for gaming, like they seem to be doing. Such is properly the role of a dGPU. Most consumers won't even notice, because they never open their cases anyway. But they'll appreciate the lower cost, and enthusiasts will appreciate the better CPU performance or lower heat. Better all around.

[silikone]

On 6/7/2019 at 1:27 AM, FlimFlam said:

The market is wrong. But first let me concede that iGPUs are critical in smartphones and useful in laptops. I was talking about desktops.

 

The problem is this: Space is at a premium inside the CPU, but is many orders of magnitude more available in the rest of the case. This is even true in 'slim' form factor cases. Some dGPUs are extremely tiny and don't even need a PCIe x16 slot. The space currently taken up by iGPUs is very much more useful as part of the main processing units, and a dGPU could replace the iGPU at any price point, and in any form-factor case. I am absolutely certain that is the better way to design them. I will say that, perhaps, a very minimalistic (and much much smaller) iGPU is useful for troubleshooting. But Intel and AMD should stop wasting space trying to make iGPUs competitive for gaming, like they seem to be doing. Such is properly the role of a dGPU. Most consumers won't even notice, because they never open their cases anyway. But they'll appreciate the lower cost, and enthusiasts will appreciate the better CPU performance or lower heat. Better all around.

Ideally, you would use both pieces of integrated circuits.

I believe there was a third-party solution advertised on some motherboards that could leverage the power of the iGPU to augment high-end gaming, but I heard it had problems. Now, we have modern API's with more flexible dual-GPU possibilities. Couldn't DX12 be worked to take advantage of it natively?