Discrete vs built-in video

[netxzero64]

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of discrete and built-in VC? aside from performance standpoint?

 

[footballrunner800]

The main disadvantage of built in video is probably that it uses your system memory. Besides that if you aren't gaming and you have a recent chipset your system will use less energy and be cooler than a discrete vc.

 

[jvroig]

I don't know what you mean by "aside from performance standpoint". It is exactly the performance that makes you go discrete. I'm sure there are some few exceptions out there, but the main reason you go out to buy a discrete card is because the integrated video lacks enough performance for your needs.

One can always say "integrated graphics uses far less power", sure, but that doesn't count for anything when it can't run the games you play or it is not enough for your HTPC needs or whatever you intend to use it for.

 

[Seero]

What are the main advantages and disadvantages of discrete and built-in VC? aside from performance standpoint?

Integrated Advantages:
Cheaper
Generate less heat
Less power consumption
Minimum maintenance
Can be disabled if Discrete is present.

Discrete Advantages:
Can be upgraded
Does not share resources (RAM)
Much more powerful
Scalable

Integrated Disadvantages:
As to integrated, although there exist video chips that can be scaled up, the options are very restricted.
Replacing the board is cheaper when the on-board dies.
Good mobo doesn't come with integrated video.
Really poor performance on games and graphic heavy apps.
May not have enough power(VRAM) to push high resolution displays.

Discrete Disadvantages:
Extra power source may be needed.
Noisier due to the extra fan.
Require additional spaces.

If you haven't hear of Fussion from AMD, check it out. It is a good solution for low/med end PC which should out preform Integrated.

 

[netxzero64]

Integrated Advantages:
Cheaper
Generate less heat
Less power consumption
Minimum maintenance
Can be disabled if Discrete is present.

Discrete Advantages:
Can be upgraded
Does not share resources (RAM)
Much more powerful
Scalable

Integrated Disadvantages:
As to integrated, although there exist video chips that can be scaled up, the options are very restricted.
Replacing the board is cheaper when the on-board dies.
Good mobo doesn't come with integrated video.
Really poor performance on games and graphic heavy apps.
May not have enough power(VRAM) to push high resolution displays.

Discrete Disadvantages:
Extra power source may be needed.
Noisier due to the extra fan.
Require additional spaces.

If you haven't hear of Fussion from AMD, check it out. It is a good solution for low/med end PC which should out preform Integrated.

very comprehensive info, much appreciated sir... and yes i've heard about and seen the demo using AMD fusion technology, I have to say that AMD has done their homework on this one..

what are the softwares that pushes the integrated video to the limit? with the exception of games of course

 

[Seero]

very comprehensive info, much appreciated sir... and yes i've heard about and seen the demo using AMD fusion technology, I have to say that AMD has done their homework on this one..

what are the softwares that pushes the integrated video to the limit? with the exception of games of course

Integrated video chipset act as a medium/channel/path to display. It doesn't do anything, just passes information. The limitation of Integrated video is on what resolutions it supports, not performance as CPU is the one doing the job. Integrated is good for laptops as it comes with a set display. As to desktop, HD 1080 should not be a problem, but WUVGA or above like dual display will be a problem.

This is why Integrated will share resources as it really isn't a processing unit, but an IC that reroute data to the display port. So other than the resolution, there are no limits.

In terms of performance, it all depends on CPU. Depending on what video you are watching, you may encounter shutterness on HD 1080 videos due to the decoding. Again, that depends on the horsepower as well as the availability of the CPU.

Youtube high def is a good website to test integrated. If it is smooth, then the integrated should be good enough to play any HD movies that is out today.

 

[jvroig]

@Seero

I am not sure I follow what you are trying to say. "The CPU is the one doing the job" and "In terms of performance, it all depends on the CPU" ? You make it sound like all integrated video are equal. I am pretty sure the HD4200 is a step up from an HD 3200, for example. And that all integrated video from Intel (until the i3 GPUs came) were far less capable than nVidia and AMD integrated solutions. And that in all cases, these integrated graphics do have hardware of their own - the HD4200 for example has 40 SPs.

I must be misunderstanding what you are trying to say.

 

[NoQuarter]

Integrated video chipset act as a medium/channel/path to display. It doesn't do anything, just passes information. The limitation of Integrated video is on what resolutions it supports, not performance as CPU is the one doing the job. Integrated is good for laptops as it comes with a set display. As to desktop, HD 1080 should not be a problem, but WUVGA or above like dual display will be a problem.

This is why Integrated will share resources as it really isn't a processing unit, but an IC that reroute data to the display port. So other than the resolution, there are no limits.

In terms of performance, it all depends on CPU. Depending on what video you are watching, you may encounter shutterness on HD 1080 videos due to the decoding. Again, that depends on the horsepower as well as the availability of the CPU.

Youtube high def is a good website to test integrated. If it is smooth, then the integrated should be good enough to play any HD movies that is out today.

Intel's IGP relies on the CPU for geometry and transform & lighting but does accelerate pixel shading and rasterization so it's not just a pass through like a lot of onboard audio codecs that rely on the CPU for everything.

AMD's IGP's are fully capable GPU's, of course they have very limited resources - but they do hardware geometry and T&L so do everything you'd expect from a discrete. Another interesting thing with newer AMD IGP's such as the Radeon 4200 is the motherboard has a 128MB memory chip on board called SidePort memory specifically for the IGP so the IGP doesn't have to share any resources at all with the system.

 

[Seero]

@Seero

I am not sure I follow what you are trying to say. "The CPU is the one doing the job" and "In terms of performance, it all depends on the CPU" ? You make it sound like all integrated video are equal. I am pretty sure the HD4200 is a step up from an HD 3200, for example. And that all integrated video from Intel (until the i3 GPUs came) were far less capable than nVidia and AMD integrated solutions. And that in all cases, these integrated graphics do have hardware of their own - the HD4200 for example has 40 SPs.

I must be misunderstanding what you are trying to say.

You didn't misunderstand, but I didn't say all integrated video are equal. Older Integrated Graphic Unit (IGU) doesn't support HD 1080. I can't put it in simple words. Google a bit and you will find better description about "GPU accelerated video decoding" or This AnandTech Article.

Flash 10.1 is very new and attempt to utilize SP, as you can see CPU is still working very hard and trying to use GPU to decode may not be better off.

 

[Sickamore]

Put it simple for him. Having a graphics card on your board removes the stress or load on the cpu. That way the CPU can process its job much better. Integrated is just there to allow minimal multimedia usage etc. The User of the computer cannot do anything extreme with onboard graphics for eg run games like crysis at maximum. Amd Fusion will be a great addition to a cpu processor but wont take away the graphics card job.

 

[netxzero64]

I kinda experienced playing an h.264 format on my old laptop with a nvidia 7300 IGP, I noticed some lag on playing it..

but does it really depend on the processor for the IGP to really perform well?

 

[jvroig]

You didn't misunderstand, but I didn't say all integrated video are equal. Older Integrated Graphic Unit (IGU) doesn't support HD 1080. I can't put it in simple words. Google a bit and you will find better description about "GPU accelerated video decoding" or This AnandTech Article.

Flash 10.1 is very new and attempt to utilize SP, as you can see CPU is still working very hard and trying to use GPU to decode may not be better off.

Why are you focusing on Flash 10.1? He was asking about IGP performance (not Flash specific or anything), and saying it is "dependent on the CPU" because "it doesn't do anything, the CPU is doing all the work" is misleading, because you end up describing the IGP as if it had no hardware on its own and was reliant on the CPU for all its processing, when in fact it is not so, which is why I called this statement out as wrong:

This is why Integrated will share resources as it really isn't a processing unit, but an IC that reroute data to the display port. So other than the resolution, there are no limits.

The IGP does work on its own, it has its own set of hardware, it doesn't just pass information, it does processing on its own like a regular discrete card would, except that IGPs are slower / less powerful. Now, whether the IGP (or discrete GPU for that matter) is any help at all in work loads aside from gaming depends specifically on the drivers and software used or even versions of the software.

but does it really depend on the processor for the IGP to really perform well?

No. Each IGP has its own capabilities. If you get a better IGP (for example, a newer board), then it will perform better. Outside of gaming though, there are only very few applications that use GPUs (discrete or integrated), so if you are concerned about offloading video playback to the GPU, all you can do is research what cards are the best for HTPC systems which fall in your own use case, and you will most likely end up with a low-end discrete card - at least, that's what I've seen recommended most of the time as "perfect HTPC cards". Not everything having to do with "graphics" is actually done on a GPU (whether discrete or integrated), so stuff like watching movies of any format may or may not be GPU-accelerated, depending on the format, software involved, drivers, etc.

 

[Seero]

Why are you focusing on Flash 10.1? He was asking about IGP performance (not Flash specific or anything), and saying it is "dependent on the CPU" because "it doesn't do anything, the CPU is doing all the work" is misleading, because you end up describing the IGP as if it had no hardware on its own and was reliant on the CPU for all its processing, when in fact it is not so, which is why I called this statement out as wrong:


The IGP does work on its own, it has its own set of hardware, it doesn't just pass information, it does processing on its own like a regular discrete card would, except that IGPs are slower / less powerful. Now, whether the IGP (or discrete GPU for that matter) is any help at all in work loads aside from gaming depends specifically on the drivers and software used or even versions of the software.


No. Each IGP has its own capabilities. If you get a better IGP (for example, a newer board), then it will perform better. Outside of gaming though, there are only very few applications that use GPUs (discrete or integrated), so if you are concerned about offloading video playback to the GPU, all you can do is research what cards are the best for HTPC systems which fall in your own use case, and you will most likely end up with a low-end discrete card - at least, that's what I've seen recommended most of the time as "perfect HTPC cards". Not everything having to do with "graphics" is actually done on a GPU (whether discrete or integrated), so stuff like watching movies of any format may or may not be GPU-accelerated, depending on the format, software involved, drivers, etc.

Incoming wall of ill-english!

You are confused. IGP does nothing other than receive data from CPU and send data to display port. CPU does all the heavy work when it comes to computing video feeds. Better IGP support better resolution and governs the maximum FPS output, which should be far above 200 FPS. If you ain't getting those frame rates, then the bottleneck isn't on the IGU. CPU speed is the controlling variable when it comes to play video, and if it isn't for gaming or video, then IGU does nothing else.

Let me go in a bit deeper. Let say each pixel requires 3 bytes to draw, then go draw a single frame at resolution 1920x1080x3 = 6,220,800 bytes or 6MB. To produce 60FPS it requires 360MB per second. Streaming video requires less than 200kb/sec, meaning their are lots of decoding required from 200KB to 360MB. How the data should be decoded depends on which codec it uses, and codec decryption is handled by CPU. However, CPU doesn't need to send 360Mb/sec through the bridge to the PCIE bus all time as IGU is capable of doing some decoding. Unlike discrete video card, where they have on-board memory, when you move a window around, IGU really doesn't know how the previous screen looks like and CPU must supply the entire scene to IGU before it can draw. The problem is it is expensive to continuously since 360MB/sec worth of data through the bridge to the PCIE given that the CPU cannot process anything else while the bus are in use. Let say the CPU is running at 9x the bus speed, then the CPU could have process 360MBx9=3Gb worth of data. So it is wise to compress those 360MB of data into something smaller before sending it to IGU, but that requires IGU to be able to decompress it. If IGP is present, than the compressed data can be sent through the bridge and to the PCIE and IGP decompress the data to the display port on the fly. Video card driver carries the codec that works best for the IGP to ensure that IGP will not become the bottleneck, while CPU encode the 360mb of data using the codec specified by the video card driver, send it, and IGU uses the same codec to decode and throw it towards the display port. Since the codec can not be dynamically change depend on the load of IGU, the speed of the IGU governs the maximum FPS. Hence if the video isn't smooth, then CPU is choking.

Note that the codec used to decode the video feed is not the same as the codec used to decode data used by IGU, but programmers are smart. If IGU has the power use codec, is it possible to have the same codec as the video feed? Yes, it is possible. Will it be faster that way? In terms of traffic, yes. In terms of performance, it depends. CPU is very powerful and can decode heavily compressed data, but IGU may not have the same power to do so. Does this mean the IGU is doing the heavy job? No, CPU must first decode the video, figure out where everything is, i.e. window layer, re-encode only the video portion, then send to PCIe. Can you see that CPU is doing most of the work?

Gaming is a completely different beast as CPU may not send the entire scene at once. If video card has RAM, the CPU and first send the game world as matrix representation as well as each objects used and send matrix transformation and additional objects and effects during the game. If there are no VRAM, then CPU must figure out what, how, and where to draw, compress it, then send.

Again, there are always exceptions as some IGUs do have RAM, but are more or less useless if you ain't into gaming. If you are into gaming, then you should really get a discrete card. OP has hinted that s/he is not interested in gaming. Other than gaming, watch video is what IGU are for. Not everyone knows what they are for and salesmen always make them sound like a must have. Smart people first find out what those does, then see if they are of any use to them before buying.

Please note that, not only video card can have their own processor, but sound card and network card also can have their own processors. They all claim to offload CPU, but they really don't offload CPU much but the traffic required to be sent except GPU, where it can actually offload CPU during gaming. Good sound card helps gaming as well as good NIC because it free up traffics, but that is another story for another thread.

 

[jvroig]

CPU speed is the controlling variable when it comes to play video

Agree.

if it isn't for gaming, then IGU does nothing else.

Agree.

[portion about codecs / streaming video]
snip

I think we miscommunicated.

Let's try to communicate better, I think I see where the problem lies.

All I wanted to clarify was the unclear statement that IGPs are nothing "but an IC that reroute data to the display port", and that don't process anything on because an IGP "really isn't a processing unit". Taken at face value, without the proper context, this is wrong, which is what I tried to clarify from you.

It seems to me that what you meant to say was "in video acceleration, IGPs don't really process anything on their own", which is not wrong.

It was started by this quote:

Integrated video chipset act as a medium/channel/path to display. It doesn't do anything, just passes information. The limitation of Integrated video is on what resolutions it supports, not performance as CPU is the one doing the job.

When you made that statement, it was not clear if you were talking about it strictly in the context of video acceleration or not. Since no context was given, when I read that statement it struck me as odd, because you seem to say "Meh, IGPs are nothing but leeches on the CPU, they don't really do anything useful on their own". It is as if you were relegating IGPs to nothing more than "fake graphics cards".

Now I see what you wanted to say: "Meh, IGPs are nothing but leeches on the CPU, they don't really do anything useful on their own as far as video decoding/playback/acceleration is concerned". That's a heck of a lot different, and I agree. In other words, the quote above should rightly be interpreted as:

As far as video decoding/playback/acceleration is concerned, integrated video chipset act as a medium/channel/path to display. It doesn't do anything, just passes information. The limitation of Integrated video is on what resolutions it supports, not performance as CPU is the one doing the job.

It's all a case of missing context and resulting miscommunication. In hindsight, I suppose I should have assumed you were talking of video acceleration only (not gaming), but it was just hard to determine from your original post.

 

[Seero]

very comprehensive info, much appreciated sir... and yes i've heard about and seen the demo using AMD fusion technology, I have to say that AMD has done their homework on this one..

what are the softwares that pushes the integrated video to the limit? with the exception of games of course

Snip

Since the question from OP explicitly stated to exclude gaming, therefore my reply solely applies to applications excluding gaming. Other than video streaming, I can't see what other applications that will take advantage of IGU, and other than resolution, I don't see any other impacts IGU can bring.

Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Vesku]

Seero, I think you are completely ignoring the programmable GPU initiatives that have taken off over the last few years. OpenCL and such, the idea being to make the powerful FPU processing of the GPU accessible to more programs then just games. Think of it as hardware acceleration akin to SSE instructions and similar.