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Intel releasing new cheap Sandies in September

HTPC? I'd rather not. Intel HD 2000/3000 image quality compared to the E- and A-series APUs is horrifying on large 1080p displays, IMHO. Adding an inexpensive, low-power dGPU would yield a more powerful CPU and good image quality, but likely use more power and of course, expense.
 
"Horrifying?"

I have a socket 775 board with Intel integrated graphics. It looked good to my eyes on my Sony Bravia 52" LCD. I switched to AMD integrated because the on-board graphics wouldn't hold the native resolution on boot. But honestly I never noticed a difference in image quality? And my eyes with glasses are pretty good.
 
I think it boils down more to this: If you're primarily just streaming, an Intel HD2000/3000 is plenty enough. If find yourself playing a lot of DVD/Blurays as well, then getting an AMD/Nvidia addon card is preferable due to the image quality enhancements that can be loaded on the extra shader count.

I use my laptop as a glorified HTPC when I'm not using it for, well, more laptop oriented purposes. I output it to my 46" 1080p TV, and it looks and plays great. Even plays WoW, Diablo 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Source engine games like a breeze.

Most of the time though, I'm just streaming Starcraft 2 matches lol.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
HTPC? I'd rather not. Intel HD 2000/3000 image quality compared to the E- and A-series APUs is horrifying on large 1080p displays, IMHO. Adding an inexpensive, low-power dGPU would yield a more powerful CPU and good image quality, but likely use more power and of course, expense.
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Really ; I use my browser watching all sorts of videos and the NV 560Ti is no better at viewing movies and other videos than is the intel 3000.Including HD and blu ray
 
Nemesis 1 said:
Really ; I use my browser watching all sorts of videos and the NV 560Ti is no better at viewing movies and other videos than is the intel 3000.Including HD and blu ray
Click to expand...

I have a mac mini with intel 3000 and a diy pc with sapphire hd7750 the difference on netflix is easy to see.

both go to a 46 inch sony and i can switch from either computer with a simple button.

A lot depends on what you watch and stream. I don't see the visual difference with youtube videos nearly as much.
 
Haven't noticed any image quality issues between HD2000 and a discrete hd4830 at 1080 on my Samsung 46.

When I have time I'll run strictly off the hd2000 and see how it does.
 
If they are still producing Sandys this makes me nervous if Haswell is going to even be on time 🙁
 
alyarb said:
he doesn't know it. tons of people assume netflix is some kind of flash player and they expect flash video runs on the GPU, because it does.

silverlight, not so much
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I don't know what you people are talking about, could you tell us more about how to run flash from GPU and not CPU?
 
You can right-click the plugin and disable hardware acceleration in flash player settings, but that's about as deep as the config goes. You can't say accelerate video but not geometry, or only accelerate video from these domains, etc. It's either on or off.

netflix does not use flash so it's basically cpu-only for now.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
HTPC? I'd rather not. Intel HD 2000/3000 image quality compared to the E- and A-series APUs is horrifying on large 1080p displays, IMHO.
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What exactly is 'horrifying' about the image quality? I'm building an HTPC and looking at Intel CPUs with HD 2000 graphics. I want to play / stream up to 1080p video, no gaming. Do the AMD CPUs have some kind of post-processing that I'd be missing out on?
 
spiral529 said:
What exactly is 'horrifying' about the image quality? I'm building an HTPC and looking at Intel CPUs with HD 2000 graphics. I want to play / stream up to 1080p video, no gaming. Do the AMD CPUs have some kind of post-processing that I'd be missing out on?
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Yes, Catalysts video processing and gaming, specially with the Trinity APUs.

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spiral529 said:
What exactly is 'horrifying' about the image quality? I'm building an HTPC and looking at Intel CPUs with HD 2000 graphics. I want to play / stream up to 1080p video, no gaming. Do the AMD CPUs have some kind of post-processing that I'd be missing out on?
Click to expand...

Nopes.
 
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21099/11

Whether or not you'll see it depends on what you're doing and your display. In my experience HD 2000 vs 6450 display quality was barely noticeable while doing productivity work and watching BR-Ds on my old 32" LED LCD. It became very noticeable (i.e. 'horrifying') when I upgraded to a 42" LED LCD. You can imagine my surprise when I hooked up my brand new display to my same old system, and the text and BR-Ds looked like shit. I hooked the old display back up and it looked fine. I remembered having read about IQ differences between Intel HD and AMD/Nvidia, so I installed a 6450. Looks great now. For the sake of thoroughness, I checked the difference with the 32" LED LCD, and while it wasn't as pronounced, it was there now that I was looking for it.

Edit: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/30/how-does-intels-hd-4000-compare-on-the-iq-scale/

You can see there that HD 4000 was a big step forward, but it's still not up to par with AMD and Nvidia.
 
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Gigantopithecus said:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21099/11Edit: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/30/how-does-intels-hd-4000-compare-on-the-iq-scale/

You can see there that HD 4000 was a big step forward, but it's still not up to par with AMD and Nvidia.
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That difference in AF quality was noted to be only in DX9 and doesn't exist in DX10 and DX11. Also, the issue was fixed in the latest driver.

For 2D, the HD 3000 may have some problems the HD 4000 addressed:

http://www.realworldtech.com/ivy-bridge-gpu/8/

One problem that Intel found with the Sandy Bridge GPU and power management was image degradation. Specifically, certain software-based image quality techniques were only used in notebooks plugged into the wall. When a notebook was running on the battery, the power management would throttle to conserve energy. In Ivy Bridge, many image quality techniques were moved into fixed function hardware (e.g. contrast enhancement in the ROPs) that is extremely efficient. Due to the higher efficiency, the image quality techniques can be used in any mode (either AC or DC), with minimal impact to battery life.
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