ATI in turn has Stream, and DirectCompute and OpenCL are industry standards that will hopefully supersede CUDA and Stream, but for the time being we have to give the GPGPU crown to NVIDIA. And of course, NVIDIA also has CUDA and PhysX to talk about. Frankly, if the Mobility Radeon 5800 series is going to have any chance at winning gamer mindshare, those plans can't come soon enough. (And as a side note, we still haven't seen much in the way of driver updates for that platform!) We asked ATI about this and were told that an improved mobile driver plan should be coming "very soon".
AMD MOBILITY RADEON HD 5000 DRIVER UPDATE DRIVERS
This is especially important for CrossFire and SLI solutions, and that's the one area where ATI's Mobility Radeon drivers have been severely lacking. We tested the ASUS W90Vp and found that it can offer compelling performance… when the drivers worked properly. The other big reason that NVIDIA has ruled the high-end of mobile solutions is driver support. Then again, it's difficult to deal with laptop power and cooling constraints. That's good for the manufacturers, but we're not particularly happy that laptops are still less than half the performance of desktop parts. We've seen Gateway, ASUS, Dell, Clevo, and others go from 8800M to 9800M to GTX 260M/280M with very few updates to accommodate the new GPUs.
AMD MOBILITY RADEON HD 5000 DRIVER UPDATE UPDATE
With only minor tweaks to the design, it has been easy for manufacturers to update existing lines with support for new NVIDIA graphics solutions. We're still running G92b cores in the GTX 280M, and the G92 first became available almost 2 years ago with the 8800M series. In contrast, we are only aware of two laptops that shipped with the Mobility Radeon 4870 chips. NVIDIA also sells far more low-end and midrange mobile GPUs than high-end parts, but as far as high-end laptop graphics is concerned, NVIDIA has had a clear lead for a while, for a couple of reasons.įirst, NVIDIA has been very good about OEM/ODM design wins for their fastest GPUs. As for the 4800 series, it's still sitting at less than 5% (with the remainder of ATI's sales apparently coming from older 3000 series parts). 15% of sales are from the 4600 series, which is where reasonable gaming can finally enter the picture.
That of course doesn't tell the full story, and in speaking with ATI we were informed that 70% of sales have been 4300/4500 parts - the lowest performing, least expensive offerings.
0 kommentar(er)
