Integrated Graphics Lose to CPU
Microsoft's new WARP10 software shows Core i7 to be Intel's best graphics chip.
Most people don’t realise that Intel has been the world’s number one manufacturer of graphics hardware for a long, long time. This is a similar situation to Nokia being the world’s top manufacturer of cameras – it is incidental to the business they are in. So, while the raw numbers put Intel ahead of the ‘names’ in graphics, AMD and NVIDIA, the quality of the product is very different.
While the company may well pitch 3D graphics performance when talking about its integrated chipsets, the numbers it runs with are always in the order of ‘400% faster’ – which, of course, refers to Intel’s previous generation chipset. Going from two to ten frames per second is indeed a 400% increase, but it still doesn’t mean the 3D is usable beyond the desktop.
While the sheer power of the chips produced by NVIDIA and AMD is finally being utilised beyond gaming, Intel’s chips aren’t even in the ballpark of the design or performance needed to do this high performance general purpose computing. Which has never really been a problem, because, after all, graphics have just been a support act for Intel’s main show, the CPU.
Intel does see the writing on the wall, and is tackling it with Larrabee, the still in-development but solidly hyped move into graphics. For the best in-depth info this article on Anandtech covers Larrabee, but the salient points to know is that Larrabee is a massively multi-core general purpose processor with vector ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Units) strapped on (vector units are a staple of graphics cards, setting up the data needed by the pixel processors that do the actual shading). It isn’t just a graphics processor, but it can implement OpenGL/DirectX in the same way a GPU can.
As part of this move towards general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing, the operating system needs more access to hardware than it did when it was just making pretty pictures. It’s resulting in a general opening of the GPU/OS interactions, which is where this interesting article on MSDN about Microsoft’s WARP10 technology for Windows 7 comes in.
Not to be confused with OS2 WARP, WARP stands for ‘Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform’ and 10 refers to DirectX 10. What this software does is allow a PC to run DirectX 10 applications without a graphics card, employing the CPU instead. Of course, this is a grossly inferior solution for anyone needing performance graphics, but Microsoft indicates that there is, indeed, a current need for it:
WARP allows fast rendering in a variety of situations where hardware implementations are unavailable, including:
- When the user does not have any Direct3D capable hardware
- When running as a service or in a server environment
- When no video card installed
- When a video driver is not available, or is not working correctly
- When a video card is out of memory, hangs or would take too many system resources to initialize.
It certainly opens up a lot of possibilities and is obviously a technology needed for when the promised CPU/GPU hybrid-style processors start appearing. If you look at Microsoft’s testing data, you’ll see that CPUs still suck for graphics, with the 3.0GHz Core i7 coming out fastest in Microsoft’s Crysis benchmarks with an average framerate of 7.36. In contrast, the same scene rendered on an NVIDIA 8800 GTS card yielded 84.8 frames on average.
The really funny thing? Intel’s Core i7 is already a better graphics processor than its integrated DirectX 10 solution which managed only 5.17 frames. Keep this up and Larrabee will be on track for the 400% performance boost claims. Let’s just hope the gap between it and the competition still isn’t so chasm-like.
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