Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis

Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by reitzensteinm on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @04:33AM (#10158047)

I'm really looking forward to a benchmark of the GT4 graphics; I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics.

Of course, it'll still be a rare and power hungry configuration, so it's not like I'll suddenly be using a Macbook, but it's a nice progression.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by bd on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @06:06AM (#10158290)

I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics.

Please don't :). New iGPUs may be catching up to old dGPUs, but meanwhile new dGPUs are just skyrocketing in power far beyond them.

I made this chart to easily see relative performance of most common notebook GPUs:

http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png

Or if you are interested in both desktop and notebook GPUs relative performances:

http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/

What Intel does is great for rising minimal specs you can expect in notebook graphics, but you can do much better than that, even cheap modern dGPUs wipe out the best iGPUs. You can extrapolate Skylake Iris Pro from Intel marketing claims vs older Iris Pros, it's going to be better but not Earth-shatteringly better.

And this gap is just going to get wider in 2016, with HBM2 and 16 nm node sizes finally coming to GPUs (both to Nvidia with Pascal and AMD with Arctic Islands).

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by wlesieutre on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @10:52AM (#10159602)

Even if you're developing a high-end crazy graphics game in UT4 on your desktop with SLIed GTX 980s, it's still useful to be able to work on it from a laptop at more than 2 FPS.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by reitzensteinm on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @10:56AM (#10159635)

That's exactly my situation. Going to 720p requires half the fill rate of 1080p. Turn off some postprocessing and antialiasing and you might get double the performance again.

So if you're at 1/4 peak performance, you're still running a smooth game albeit not quite at full detail.

If you're at 1/16 peak performance... things aren't looking too good by the time you get your game smooth.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by bd on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @12:35PM (#10160399)

And that was exactly my point :) In case it wasn't clear from the context, I was suggesting getting a notebook with a discrete GPU instead of integrated GPU (that's what iGPU/dGPU stand for, not a desktop GPU).

If you are game developer / graphics programmer / game player / designer / photo or video editor / VR enthusiast / anybody who cares about graphics, I would advise to get at least GTX 960M (if you have budget or size constrains, this should get you roughly to PS4/Xbox One levels, so relatively safe for this gen), but preferably GTX 970M (best price/power and you can still get slim notebook).

GTX 970M will get you about average GPU performance overall, including desktops (these days I get ~50-percentile rank in 3dmark firestrike with my GTX 970M notebook, so average GPU in September 2015 is at least as fast or faster, at least for that cohort of people).

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by coldtea on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @02:46PM (#10161206)

>Please don't :). New iGPUs may be catching up to old dGPUs, but meanwhile new dGPUs are just skyrocketing in power far beyond them.

So? When did the idea behind developing games got to have the most eye-candy to take advantage of new dGPUs?

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by Symmetry on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @10:15AM (#10159275)

On Linux Intel has been doing pretty well making high performance (meaning as good as Windows) open source drivers for their integrated graphics which makes the GT4 sort of appealing to me.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by lewisl9029 on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @04:54AM (#10158104)

I'm still hoping for external GPUs to catch on.

A decent CPU and adequate graphics is usually all I need in a laptop while traveling, but it would be nice to be able to plug in a more beefy GPU at home to play games and drive more monitors at higher resolutions.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by reitzensteinm on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @05:17AM (#10158166)

Well, Thunderbolt 3 now explicitly supports them (previously Intel wouldn't certify for what appeared to be non-technical reasons), so it might actually catch on.

I don't expect it to be cheap; but even if the chassis is a few hundred dollars, if you can reuse them for three generations of GPU and laptop, it's probably worth it.

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by justincormack on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @08:09AM (#10158636)

So far they have largely been built into monitors (by Sony) which gives different obsolescence profile.

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Re:Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis by LoSboccacc on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @05:32AM (#10158205)

according to some bench even the i5 6500 gpu is as good as my dedicated (but old) readeon hd 6670 - which would put it in the "good enough to run crysis 2 with some compromises" territory

even this GPU would make for a great value proposition in a midrange macbook pro

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