How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006

A place to give your thoughts on our reviews!
Post Reply
User avatar
Apoptosis
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 33941
Joined: Sun Oct 05, 2003 8:45 pm
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Contact:

How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006

Post by Apoptosis »

How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006?

Since Legit Reviews first came online nearly a decade ago the one phrase that we have heard consistently over the years is that “integrated graphics suck” and that you should never use them. Is that true? We gathered up 10 AMD and Intel motherboards to check out integrated graphics performance from 2006 to 2011 to see how they perform on four game titles and Futuremark 3Dmark06. Read on to see how far we have come in recent years.

Image
Image
Overall, we found that AMD integrated graphics were superior to Intel from 2007-2011. Both companies are improving their graphics solutions and we saw a nice 6x to 7x performance improvement on average. If you are looking to buy an integrated graphics solution today you have the Intel Sandy Bridge processors with Intel HD 3000 graphics and AMD's Llano APU with the Radeon HD 6550D. Our testing shows that the AMD Llano GPU is essentially twice as fast...
Article Title: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006?
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1859/1/
Find us on Facebook to discover the faces behind the names!
Follow Me on Twitter!
User avatar
Major_A
Legit Extremist
Legit Extremist
Posts: 3793
Joined: Tue May 15, 2007 2:11 pm
Location: Houston, TX

Re: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since

Post by Major_A »

How times have changed. It seems like only a few years ago when the onboard GPU wasn't even very good at Flash.
User avatar
Kaos Kid
Legit Extremist
Legit Extremist
Posts: 958
Joined: Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:31 am
Location: 40 clicks West of the Gateway

Re: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since

Post by Kaos Kid »

Good Read! I am mainly an ATI/AMD guy but do have some Intel stuff in the house and the Intel graphics in my kids' boards (GMA 3000 & 3100) are adequate for their purposes but nothing special, but then again as long as it beats the old AGP standard they don't need anything better right now. The rest of my integrated boards have ATI HD 3200, HD 4200, and HD 4290. They are a bit better, and the HD3200 is actually in my HTPC and does a fine job on 1080 .mkv blueray rips when paired with a PhenomII X2 550 unlocked to 3 cores. The handiest thing about my onboard ATI graphics is they all have DVI out and HDMI out, which my Intel stuff doesn't have.

FWIW ATI rules Intel on onboard graphics, but only people that use light applications like videoediting will appreciate that since gamers will only want the latest and greatest discrete cards (and who can blame them? ;) )
I have come to the conclusion that "FaceBook" should be renamed "FacePalm" :roll:
User avatar
FZ1
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 4448
Joined: Mon Dec 27, 2004 6:49 pm
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Contact:

Re: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since

Post by FZ1 »

Kaos Kid wrote:Good Read! I am mainly an ATI/AMD guy but do have some Intel stuff in the house and the Intel graphics in my kids' boards (GMA 3000 & 3100) are adequate for their purposes but nothing special, but then again as long as it beats the old AGP standard they don't need anything better right now. The rest of my integrated boards have ATI HD 3200, HD 4200, and HD 4290. They are a bit better, and the HD3200 is actually in my HTPC and does a fine job on 1080 .mkv blueray rips when paired with a PhenomII X2 550 unlocked to 3 cores. The handiest thing about my onboard ATI graphics is they all have DVI out and HDMI out, which my Intel stuff doesn't have.

FWIW ATI rules Intel on onboard graphics, but only people that use light applications like videoediting will appreciate that since gamers will only want the latest and greatest discrete cards (and who can blame them? ;) )
Actually, many of the nicer video editing apps take advantage of the discrete GPU's for rendering which adds a huge boost to the time it takes.
Joe
User avatar
Major_A
Legit Extremist
Legit Extremist
Posts: 3793
Joined: Tue May 15, 2007 2:11 pm
Location: Houston, TX

Re: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since

Post by Major_A »

FZ1 wrote:Actually, many of the nicer video editing apps take advantage of the discrete GPU's for rendering which adds a huge boost to the time it takes.
I was playing with this and here's what I noticed. I ran Arcsoft Media Converter 7 to convert a Youtube file using QuickSync, CUDA and the CPU. QuickSync was the fastest but I noticed a rather dubious anomaly. All the resulting file sizes were different.
QuickSync: 185MB
CUDA: 180MB
CPU: 160MB
Seems like QuickSync and CUDA work faster by not compressing the video as well as the CPU. Other than the file size differences I couldn't tell a difference in video quality.

*EDIT*
I just re-ran the tests using a 1080 Youtube clip to EVO 4G using Arcsoft Media Converter 7.5
GPU_Assisted.png
GPU_Assisted.png (5.28 KiB) Viewed 3417 times
User avatar
pwcmed
Legit Extremist
Legit Extremist
Posts: 564
Joined: Fri May 02, 2008 2:03 pm

Re: How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since

Post by pwcmed »

Wow! How times have change. I remember getting like a 6500 in 3dmark 06 with a 1900XT with a E6600. Good read.
Post Reply