The Netbook Thread

[zip accident]

In the Apple thread WiteWulf wrote:

Well, after fiddling about with 10.6 on the wee Macbook at home while I was off work I got back in today and installed it on my Macbook Pro and Mac Pro and couldn't resist running OpenCLBench on them

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32 ... -benchmark

Early 2008 Macbook Pro:

Code: Select all

Number of OpenCL devices found: 2
OpenCL Device # 0 = GeForce 8600M GT
Device 0 is an: GPU with max. 940 MHz and 32 units/cores
Now computing - please be patient....
time used:  2.957 seconds

Late 2008 Macbook:

Code: Select all

Number of OpenCL devices found: 2
OpenCL Device # 0 = GeForce 9400M
Device 0 is an: GPU with max. 1100 MHz and 16 units/cores 
Now computing - please be patient....
time used:  3.539 seconds

Severly pruned.

I think that suggests the gf 9400 isn't that far behind the gf 8600.

I think CUDA and OpenCL (when the latter isn't used as a graphics device controller) is not much use for gaming, if you want all your GPU processing power for processing graphics, it's a waste to use it for crunching numbers, as would vice versa be with the CPU.

[WiteWulf]

It depends what you're doing with it. As I mentioned later in that thread, the OpenCLBench app is a real blunt instrument and I'd imagine the 8600's larger number of processing units (32 vs. 16) triumphed over the 9400's raw clock speed (1100MHz vs 940MHz).

It'll be interesting to see the comparison again when a more mature OpenCL benchmark is available.

*edit*

BTW, why are we discussing this in the Netbook thread?

[zip accident]

BTW, why are we discussing this in the Netbook thread?

Because nVidia Ion, which is an Intel Atom compatible chipset, currently used in nettops and allegedly to be used in forthcoming netbooks, includes a GF 9400. It's not going to be great, but it will be a lot better (I've recently seen nVidia claims of 10x better) than the usual netbook Intel GMA 950.

The GF 8600 is a gaming GPU, currently being sold as such in notebooks, though it's probably not what you'd pick to use in a gaming desktop.

<edit> 5/6ths of the gf 8600's performance seems likely to be good enough to me, providing the screen concerned doesn't grow to gigantic proportions. Also relevant is the minimum available resolution, I've recently been seeing minima of 800x600, that's a lot more stress on a GPU (and CPU) than 640x480.

[RiK]

Are you running the latest software updates RiK? I've held back installing the latest 10.5.8 because I've filled my 16gb ssd! Been quite tempted by a runcore 32gb one though, let me know how you get on if you do go that route

Yep, on 10.5.8 here, still waiting for the crazy internet people to get Snow Leopard working

Oh, and did you patch bluetooth so you could turn it off? My mini didn't come with bluetooth so I bought an internal one from ebay and connected it up, but had to do some limited hackery to gain the ability to turn off bluetooth!

Err, no. To be honest I didn't even think about it until you mentioned it. It seems to be on all the time unless I disable it in the bios. Must check that out as I don't really need it.

Done the BT patch now too, tiny tweak to a .plist. Working fine

[WiteWulf]

BTW, why are we discussing this in the Netbook thread?

Because nVidia Ion, which is an Intel Atom compatible chipset, currently used in nettops and allegedly to be used in forthcoming netbooks, includes a GF 9400. It's not going to be great, but it will be a lot better (I've recently seen nVidia claims of 10x better) than the usual netbook Intel GMA 950.

The GF 8600 is a gaming GPU, currently being sold as such in notebooks, though it's probably not what you'd pick to use in a gaming desktop.

<edit> 5/6ths of the gf 8600's performance seems likely to be good enough to me, providing the screen concerned doesn't grow to gigantic proportions. Also relevant is the minimum available resolution, I've recently been seeing minima of 800x600, that's a lot more stress on a GPU (and CPU) than 640x480.

Fair enough!

[Bubba]

16 shaded cores is pretty pathetic. Saying it has similar performance to an 8600 isn't considering the differences between a shader compute benchmark and a videogame.

Cheers

Bubba

[zip accident]

16 shaded cores is pretty pathetic. Saying it has similar performance to an 8600 isn't considering the differences between a shader compute benchmark and a videogame.

Cheers

Bubba

I don't know enough about the internals of video cards to consider the differences between a shader compute benchmark and a video game.

I'm not saying it is as good as a GF 8600, I'm saying so far as I can tell, it isn't that far off, I could be wrong about that, I hope not. If you can squeeze the resolution down low enough you can probably get playable framerates is what I'm hoping. I remember playing quake on a 486 at three hundred and something pixels by two hundred and something pixels, and the difference an Athlon at 1GHz with a GF 2 made was astounding you could play at over double the resolution, but it was the same game.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=513

That says the pixels per second are higher on the 9400, but on almost everything else the 8600 wins. I know that's a 9400gt, if they had a 9400m in their database I'd use that.

I've played Oblivion on a Radeon 9550 at 640x480, it wasn't ideal, but between that or nothing, the 9550 won. The gf 9400 is considerably better than a radeon 9550 as I read the figures:

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=578

<edit>

If you're saying that games shouldn't be written with a low enough minimum resolution to be played on a card that weak, I suspect they often still are, Crysis obviously being an exception to that.

I think I've heard mutterings to the effect that Ion is good enough to shift games on netbooks from GPU bound to CPU bound. I don't know what the memory organisation is like, shared system memory might be bad for GPU performance.

[Portland]

We went for an Acer A150 in the end, cos we got a boxed new one (old stock obv) pretty cheap. It's primarily meant to be a dump for pics and vids, but I suspect it might get to come on other wee trips. I can see why people would spend the extra £££ on the D250 to get bigger battery and slightly bigger screen (plus more formats in card slot), but for us it does the job quite nicely.
May have to nab a little sleeve case from the airport to protect the baby tech.

Thought of netbooks with hawt graphics is rather pleasing.

[zip accident]

Netbooks with nVidia Ion seem to be building up to availability, allegedly some are about.

The thing I think is going to drive Ion to the top of the market-place is that you can tell pretty much what it is. I know Intel GMA 950 is ruggish, but with the rest of the integrated graphics solutions it's not that clear what is what, except that apparently Intel don't yet have anything that comes close to Ion. With Ion, it's closely equivalent to a GeForce 9400, which isn't much of discrete graphics card, but it is pretty much a known quantity. If someone says to me that's a GeForce 8600, I've got some idea what it is, but with most integrated graphics chips I've no idea. If someone can say this integrated graphics chipset is effectively this discrete graphics card, I can then find out about the discrete card, and thus get some idea of what the integrated chipset is likely to be like graphically. This is where Ion beats all other integrated chipsets I know of, I can remember Ion is a GF 9400, with the rest I don't remember their names, and so far as I know, there are no discrete graphics cards they are equivalent to. A lot of laptops are still being made with strong CPUs but GPUs of the ilk of the GMA 950, and they are trying to sell these as superior to netbooks with Ion, they're not, and I don't think the public are going to fall for that one more than once if they fall for it at all.

[DTB]

ION comes complete with surround sound capability built in taking yet more load off your processor which makes it better in my opinion

[zip accident]

ION comes complete with surround sound capability built in taking yet more load off your processor which makes it better in my opinion

Oh yeah, I like that too.

[zip accident]

Wow, WoW at 20fps. Colour me thoroughly unconvinced I can't imagine many games working well on a 9400, at least many modern (last 3 years) games. Anything with vaguely modern shaders is not going to play nicely on that, even at a lower resolution...

Cheers

Bubba

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/2009 ... tbook.html

Compaq Mini 311 playing Call of Duty 4 and, in short, it seems to run pretty well. The visual settings are set to low, but the game still manages to run at 30fps

Impressive stiff.

I presume that's a typo.

<edit> Disclaimer. I haven't seen the video, I don't run videos off websites, I presume it does show something like what the text claims, but I don't know so.

[zip accident]

This may be of interest:

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptop/hp-mini-311.aspx

I think I've been put off netbooks for games, but still the HP Mini 311 doesn't sound too bad, the USA has that, we seem to have the Samsung, the specs seem pretty similar.

[zip accident]

This is what I've been trying to say:

http://gigaom.com/2009/10/06/are-gpus-a ... ok-market/

The HP Mini 311 with Nvidia ION is priced ... at $399. And those thin-and-light devices with Intel’s CULV solutions generally start around $699 or so. Sure, they may offer a little more horsepower in the CPU department, but they actually fare worse with graphic benchmarks than Nvidia’s little engine that could. LAPTOP’s testing shows the graphics scores are roughly double that of the thin-and-lights that use Intel’s GMA4500 graphics — at half the price.

These results on a $399 netbook could heavily impact sales not just of netbooks, but even the thin-and-light notebooks.

Or is this line of thinking barking up the wrong tree?

[zip accident]

A bit of a random thought this, why has no-one made a netbook with a folding keyboard? they used to sell them for Palms, I thought I heard they were quite good (though they seemed expensive to me, and I never used one). So, if the keyboard folded in some way, you could have a full sized keyboard on a small netbook.