Intel HD 3000 wow...

[jmpnop]

Meh. Apple's 13" laptops have always had crappy GPUs (Intel GMA X3100 until early '09, 9400M until mid 2010 etc), it's a good way to pull customers towards the 15".

They can't fit a discrete graphics card in such a small enclosure, hence crappy graphic cards. Until C2D, Intel allowed to use Nvidia graphics (320M, 9400M) which is a lot better than Intel HD 3000 crap. All we can do is hope for better integrated graphics from Intel.

 

[Roman2K~]

They can't fit a discrete graphics card in such a small enclosure, hence crappy graphic cards. Until C2D, Intel allowed to use Nvidia graphics (320M, 9400M) which is a lot better than Intel HD 3000 crap. All we can do is hope for better integrated graphics from Intel.

Even if it was technically possible, a discrete GPU would ruin the MBA for me (reasons). I would rather make do with the HD 3000 than deal with graphics switching.

 

[KnightWRX]

Standard voltage HD3000 a significant downgrade from 320m?

HD3000 showed an average 8% increase in FPS in six popular, modern games. -> http://www.anandtech.com/show/4084/intels-sandy-bridge-upheaval-in-the-mobile-landscape/5

What part of "lame Anand tech CPU bound benchmarks" didn't you get to link us to that damn lame benchmark again ?

Much better benchmarking has been done since then and the Anand Intel fluff piece has been shown for what it really is : Anand not trying to piss off his main supplier of hardware.

Even if it was technically possible, a discrete GPU would ruin the MBA for me (reasons). I would rather make do with the HD 3000 than deal with graphics switching.

You don't have to deal with graphics switching, laptops used to be able to have dedicated GPUs as their sole GPU.

However, then the issue becomes battery life. Really, the nVidia PCH was the best answer to this dilemma. Intel processor with a very good IGP solution.

Intel got greedy and now consumers are paying the price.

 

[Roman2K~]

You don't have to deal with graphics switching, laptops used to be able to have dedicated GPUs as their sole GPU.

I know, but this would imply that the IGP would sit there, present but unused. That doesn't bother many manufacturers, but that doesn't sit right with Apple's perfectionism (and certainly wouldn't sit right with me).

 

[Dark Void]

In most games, the GPU is the bottleneck, not the CPU. That's why games like Portal can run on a Macbook Air, but fail spectacularly on a PC with an i7 but only a IIG 3000.

Check out the new AMD cpu series, probably standard in all notebooks by x-mas.. it's a faster CPU that's about i3 speeds, plus a 6xxx series GPU that'll out-perform any intel setup, and it's priced for the $400 laptops.

i don't understand though, the intel3000 receives higher benchmarks in comparison to amd 6xxx series at that price point, according to notebook check, detailing that it is a better gpu, no?

what am i missing?

 

[Cali3350]

What part of "lame Anand tech CPU bound benchmarks" didn't you get to link us to that damn lame benchmark again ?

Much better benchmarking has been done since then and the Anand Intel fluff piece has been shown for what it really is : Anand not trying to piss off his main supplier of hardware.



You don't have to deal with graphics switching, laptops used to be able to have dedicated GPUs as their sole GPU.

However, then the issue becomes battery life. Really, the nVidia PCH was the best answer to this dilemma. Intel processor with a very good IGP solution.

Intel got greedy and now consumers are paying the price.

What is your crusade against the 3000? Anand (you know, probably the single most respected reviewer out there) and many other third party sites have repeatedly shown the HD3000 is capable of defeating the 320M in many different situations. Yes, some are CPU bound, but that hardly matters, as in the Macbook Air your going to be CPU bound. The 320M is a more powerful card, but its put into a far more limited system.

 

[Davidkoh]

What is your crusade against the 3000? Anand (you know, probably the single most respected reviewer out there) and many other third party sites have repeatedly shown the HD3000 is capable of defeating the 320M in many different situations. Yes, some are CPU bound, but that hardly matters, as in the Macbook Air your going to be CPU bound. The 320M is a more powerful card, but its put into a far more limited system.

The air is not limited by the CPU for GPU-intensive tasks which I guess you are using your GPU for.

 

[KnightWRX]

What is your crusade against the 3000? Anand (you know, probably the single most respected reviewer out there) and many other third party sites have repeatedly shown the HD3000 is capable of defeating the 320M in many different situations. Yes, some are CPU bound, but that hardly matters.

Situations which are CPU bound. IE : situations where the GPU is not the bottleneck, the CPU is. As you can't test a 320M on a Sandy Bridge CPU, you're testing it on a slower Core 2 Duo CPU.

IE : you're not testing the GPU at all and you're not proving anything as far as the GPU's performance is concerned.

So yes, it matters a lot when you're comparing GPU performance to not use CPU bound benchmarks, especially if you don't have identical CPUs. Because then your benchmark just turned into a CPU benchmark.

as in the Macbook Air your going to be CPU bound.

You don't understand what CPU bound means. It does not depend on the model of laptop you have, it depends on the task you're accomplishing. Some tasks are CPU bound, some are I/O bound, some are GPU bound, etc.. It highly depends on the task and the underlying hardware you're running it on.

Basically, what part of your pipeline are you saturating in your task. The best GPU tests are those where you saturate the GPU.

The 320M is a more powerful card, but its put into a far more limited system.

Thanks to Intel greed and legal manipulations. And the 320M is very old at this point, if Intel hadn't interferred, the next MBA with Sandy Bridge would have a 500 series IGP which would just destroy the 3000 HD. A fact that escapes many "the 3000 HD is good enough!" people.

Let's face it, Intel is serving us a GPU downgrade. For me, that is good reason enough to not like it and not want any of it.

 

[KPOM]

I don't know why Intel just didn't buy the 320m or a similar design from NVIDIA as part of the settlement, and then just use it as the "HD 3000." They got what they wanted (NVIDIA's out of the chipset business), so why not start putting in some decent integrated graphics? Ivy Bridge may be acceptable, but still not exactly stellar considering it isn't due out until 2012.

 

[ChaoticFury]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1)

I know a lot of people love to bash the HD 3000 but honestly it's not as bad as reviewers make it out to be. Plus if your getting the Macbook Pro 13" you probably were not going to do any gaming. As a trial I installed WoW and Starcraft 2 to see how they run. Honestly they both run fine. I played Starcraft for five hours last night without any problems. Sure you can't run it on great settings but it's not like it looks 8 bit. WoW runs fine and I even did an instance just to check, the game runs perfectly. For something that is integrated I am pretty impressed. Look at how far it has come from all the garbage that use to be integrated.

As much as I would love a dedicated GPU it's not like Apple hid it from everyone. You knew exactly what you were getting into when you bought it. If you wanted to play L4D or Team Fortress maybe you should have purchased an Alienware M11X.

As a secondary test I put WoW in half screen and opened up a flash video in the background. Watch an entire show while I was playing. The graphics card does well beyond what I even expected it to do.

Just thought people might need to hear from someone who is doing it and not just a bunch of numbers on a chart. If you want me to run any other tests let me know.

 

[KnightWRX]

I don't know why Intel just didn't buy the 320m or a similar design from NVIDIA as part of the settlement, and then just use it as the "HD 3000." They got what they wanted (NVIDIA's out of the chipset business), so why not start putting in some decent integrated graphics? Ivy Bridge may be acceptable, but still not exactly stellar considering it isn't due out until 2012.

Ivy Bridge will be the same thing as Sandy Bridge, it'll simply be catching up barely to what AMD/nVidia were doing the year prior. You want to know how Ivy Bridge IGPs will perform ? Look at the current crop of nVidia mobile GPUs, and substract about 10%.

Intel should've simply bought nVidia outright and ditched its own failed graphics division in order to compete with AMD/ATI.

 

[Davidkoh]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1)

I know a lot of people love to bash the HD 3000 but honestly it's not as bad as reviewers make it out to be. Plus if your getting the Macbook Pro 13" you probably were not going to do any gaming. As a trial I installed WoW and Starcraft 2 to see how they run. Honestly they both run fine. I played Starcraft for five hours last night without any problems. Sure you can't run it on great settings but it's not like it looks 8 bit. WoW runs fine and I even did an instance just to check, the game runs perfectly. For something that is integrated I am pretty impressed. Look at how far it has come from all the garbage that use to be integrated.

As much as I would love a dedicated GPU it's not like Apple hid it from everyone. You knew exactly what you were getting into when you bought it. If you wanted to play L4D or Team Fortress maybe you should have purchased an Alienware M11X.

As a secondary test I put WoW in half screen and opened up a flash video in the background. Watch an entire show while I was playing. The graphics card does well beyond what I even expected it to do.

Just thought people might need to hear from someone who is doing it and not just a bunch of numbers on a chart. If you want me to run any other tests let me know.

I can only talk for myself, I find the 320m a bit limiting when it comes to launching a casual game now and then.

The problem for me is buying a new computer that does what I do worse compared to the one I have. Theres no real incentive to buy the latest model.

 

[Daveoc64]

As a secondary test I put WoW in half screen and opened up a flash video in the background. Watch an entire show while I was playing. The graphics card does well beyond what I even expected it to do

When Flash is in the background, it shouldn't use the GPU to decode or scale the video, so that should have minimal impact on GPU performance.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Lol, a company's whole reason for making a product is for people to buy them.

Yup, and there are significantly more people who don't really care about the GPU in an ultralight than do.

If it can run iPhoto, Safari, Mail, and the occasional light game, it will sell better than not.

And the Intel graphics will be significantly cheaper than discrete graphics with an old CPU. (Did you know that Intel makes older CPUs more expensive after a while to discourage companies from trying to use them? Yup, if it's not already, the Core 2 Duo will be more expensive than Sandy Bridge - and that's BEFORE adding in chipsets, where the nVidia is already more than the SB chipset.)

 

[Cheffy Dave]

Apple may offer an external graphics solution like Sony.

One can dream...

CU, we both will have to suffer with our old 2010 MBA's

 

[FX4568]

Im worried more about heat with the new MBAs. All heat will be concentrated in the CPU. Even if its less overall, the concentration of heat at one point on the machine could be pretty bad.

 

[Roman2K~]

Im worried more about heat with the new MBAs. All heat will be concentrated in the CPU. Even if its less overall, the concentration of heat at one point on the machine could be pretty bad.

+1 (that's precisely what happened to the 13" MBP)

We'll see.

 

[calvol]

Not only "concentrated" heat, but "peak" heat from Turbo-boost. TDP is an "average" rating, and doesn't capture the essence of heat generated at max throttle. E.g. when I open new windows on my Dell i5-540M Latitude, the fans spin up immediately as TB kicks in. I wonder if the Air has enough air flow to handle this peak heat.

 

[clockwise33]

What part of "lame Anand tech CPU bound benchmarks" didn't you get to link us to that damn lame benchmark again ?

Much better benchmarking has been done since then and the Anand Intel fluff piece has been shown for what it really is : Anand not trying to piss off his main supplier of hardware.

So I guess now 3D games are CPU bound? Great, the SB MBA will see a huge improvement in 3D gaming! Tell a friend!

I guess its convenient to disregard Anandtech's HD3000 review as pandering to Intel, from the position of a 320m owner.

 

[Davidkoh]

So I guess now 3D games are CPU bound? Great, the SB MBA will see a huge improvement in 3D gaming! Tell a friend!

I guess its convenient to disregard Anandtech's HD3000 review as pandering to Intel, from the position of a 320m owner.

You don't find it a bit strange that most other benchmarks is in the favour of the 320m? Listening to one site is just dumb, you need to see which patterns can be seen throughout many major reviews. And this is that the HD3000 is slower than the 320m.

Check some reviews here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/157893/2011/02/2011macbookpro_benchmarks.html

Look, even one from Anandtech showing the opposite: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the-macbook-pro-review-13-and-15-inch-2011-brings-sandy-bridge/19

http://www.techyalert.com/2011/02/25/macbook-pro-2010-vs-macbook-pro-2011/

http://www.pcworld.com/product/817757/apple_13inch_macbook_pro23ghz_core_i5_early_2011.html?p=review

 

[Cali3350]

You don't find it a bit strange that most other benchmarks is in the favour of the 320m? Listening to one site is just dumb, you need to see which patterns can be seen throughout many major reviews. And this is that the HD3000 is slower than the 320m.

Check some reviews here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/157893/2011/02/2011macbookpro_benchmarks.html

Look, even one from Anandtech showing the opposite: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4205/the-macbook-pro-review-13-and-15-inch-2011-brings-sandy-bridge/19

http://www.techyalert.com/2011/02/25/macbook-pro-2010-vs-macbook-pro-2011/

http://www.pcworld.com/product/817757/apple_13inch_macbook_pro23ghz_core_i5_early_2011.html?p=review

There are many more variables than just looking at numbers. It matters what operating system your in (Mac OSX seems to have better performing drivers for the Intel HD3000) and the game. A game like Call of Duty 4 is completely GPU bound, so the stronger GPU of the 320M shines through. A game like Starcraft 2 is almost entirely CPU bound, so the better CPU of sandy bridge shines through.

 

[jdechko]

Despite the rumors, I really, really, really still don't see Apple using Sandy Bridge in these computers anytime soon. They'll wait for Ivy. Calling it.

After seeing how Apple managed the 13" MBP, I seriously doubt that the Air, MB and Mini won't see Sandy Bridge with the HD3000. It's pretty clear looking at the 13" Pro that Apple has determined that the performance of the CPU/GPU combo is acceptable.

EDIT: I'm not necessarily happy about dumping the 320m for the HD3000, but for what I plan on using the computer for, the HD3000 will be enough. At the same time, I'm all for an 8GB RAM option. Yes, it's contradictory to say that some specs matter, but I'm trying to be realistic. I want the best Air I can get. With Sandy Bridge, that means precisely a 0% chance of getting anything better than IIG. The 8GB RAM is technically feasible, and the probability of getting it, while still low, is at least non-zero.

 

[Duke15]

If the rumors are true and the 13" is only getting a CPU running at 17w what still leaves 8w for them to add in a discrete GPU(unless they want much better battery life), although I doubt they would differentiate the two sizes with that. If they dont do that then they should do something to compensate the cost of not having it by giving 4gigs ram standard or blk. Also it would make the 13 pro kind of useless.

Wouldnt a discrete GPU in the new MBA just go in the place that the 320 was in? Sorry if thats a stupid question.

 

[KnightWRX]

So I guess now 3D games are CPU bound? Great, the SB MBA will see a huge improvement in 3D gaming! Tell a friend!

3D games can be CPU bound, depends on how they are run. Low settings, low resolution ? The GPU is going to be sitting idle, and the CPU is going to be running hot trying to feed it as much data as it can doing bus based I/O. This is the scenario in which the 3000 HD came out on top in Anand's benchmarking.

So you won't see huge improvement in 3D gaming because you'll be cranking up the detail level anyhow. I can run games in 320x240 with low-res everything, lighting/shadows turned off, etc.. but why ?

I guess its convenient to disregard Anandtech's HD3000 review as pandering to Intel, from the position of a 320m owner.

Yes, because I own a 320m equipped MBA, I can't sell it and buy the new model with a 3000 HD if it is better, so I'm bitter and jealous.

What a wonderful argument you've made, you've found me out. I bow to your superior investigative skills.

 

[striker33]

Just used Intel HD 3000 graphic card to play Left 4 dead. The result was awful. It was wayyyyy worse than I expected. The core i5 is so freaking useless with GPU like this.

Tested in MY friend's MBP and my Samsung Series 9 laptop. They both have Intel HD 3000. I hope MBA gets a better luck.

Windows drivers suck for HD3000.

OS X drivers are far superior for gaming.