Lucid Virtue comes to AMD mobos

[Cilus]

One good news guys, especially to the AMD fan boys who were really disappointed to see the amount of feature set Intel Sandy Bridge based rigs support and only hoping for the BullDozer to knock the Intel Castle.

The news is Lucid Virtue, which is a super hit now a days due to its dynamic capability to switch between the IGP and dedicated card, available only with the Z68/H67 boards. now coming to the AMD's platform.

Check the softpedia linkLucidLogix Graphics Switching Virtu Software Now On AMD Computers - Softpedia. It states that all the upcoming Bulldozer and Brazos will enjoy the Blessing of Virtue.

 

[topgear]

But what are the benefits we will get by using virtue on AMD platform.

Only one use I can think of is HD movie watching which can use the IGP without depending on discrete gfx card to save energy

 

[Cilus]

Actually we don't know for sure if there is a AMD's version of quicksync present in their upcoming Lliano platform although I think it is possible as it is like a heterogeneous core of the processor and can assist the CPU..at least theoretically to execute X86 codes. Lets see how it performs against their Intel counterpart.

 

[vickybat]

Llanos are performing similar to their athlon or phenom 2 counter parts even after 32 nm die shrink. In an early preview by anandtech, they were beaten by core i3 2100 in almost all cpu intensive benchmarks.

The gpu is actually good and its a radeon 6450 class. Gpu performance is almost 56% more than sandybridge igp in gpu intensive games. But in cpu intensive games like dragon age etc, sandybridge is either performing on par and even beating the llano parts.

So i don't think the on-die llano gpu is assisting the cpu for executing x86 codes. Wonder how virtue will give it an advantage.

 

[Cilus]

^^ Well guys, tomorrow Vicky is gonna post some in depth reviews of Llanos, their CPU, GPU and GPGPU performances and how it has been achieved. I think he is gonna eat some of the words he posted above. Be ready to get a Batman level view of Llano.

 

[skeletor]

tbf, losing in 6 out of 10 benchmarks means *almost all*?? Nope. There is another side of the "CPU intensive" coin - multithreaded performance.

Anandtech should have been using 1866 Mhz RAM straightaway. Why the heck did they post game performance numbers @ 1024x768? Didn't even let the HD 3000's graphic bottleneck come across.

I don't expect transcode performance to be anywhere near QuickSync though.

 

[Cilus]

Ico, check the Tomshardware review. You will be more than happy. They have performed a very very in depth review with wide variety of testing...a must read one.

 

[skeletor]

^ yup, I'm more than happy actually. 30-35k laptops can actually game with much superior battery life now

 

[shayem]

After reading Tomshardware review my conclusion is; it's going to be "hit" for low budget game lovers and laptop users come game lovers. They don't need to buy high priced laptop or desktop to able to play games on their rig. But it[Llano] still lack in CPU performance with high margin. IMO even with "Virtue" it[Llano] can't compete Sandy Bridge in CPU+GPU setup except GPU relied games. For last case it'll left SB far behind IMO.

 

[Cilus]

Llano's cpu was never intended to compete against the Sandybridge and AMD already confirmed that only on an average 6% performance improvement over existing Phenom II. But it is intended to do the integration of desktop class GPU within the CPU die and it does it more than expected. As Tomshardware guys pointed out that in a laptop with day to day's work you won't find any difference between a SandyBridge and the Llano in case of CPU works but in graphics Llano kicks everything else and this is gonna be the selling factor for Llano.
Mainly 70-80% of laptop users rarely use their laptop for highly CPU intensive works but watching movies, gaming is actually expected from most sub $700 laptop buyers where llano is gonna hit.

By the way, check some game reviews of Llano in hardocp. They were playing DART 2 in high setting (only two settings are downed to medium) with 8X MSAA.

 

[shayem]

@Cilus That's what i tried to say...but thanks for the info. Your posts are always very informative. keep it up