If your gaming, you can play e-sports titles at mediocre frame rates on a 13 to 15 inch ultra book screen that’s not going to be great in terms of response times or refresh rate, so a pretty below-average experience.
If your editing video then same caveat goes as for gaming, the screen is going to be meh and the experience will be meh (although I will say that with this amount of compute, time-line scrubbing won’t be terrible).
What use case would benefit from having video acceleration, that people would legitimately want to do on an ultrabook?
Having a second screen with youtube playing?
I know several student who only have their notebook. For those, it would be great to not have stuttery video or laggy cursors.
You totally don’t need a 10 CU vega gpu for that… I use my ultrabook with its i5-5200U to do that all of the time, with its shitty now rather old intel igpu and 2 cores. Like I can put a 1080p youtube video running full screen on a second monitor and be web browsing or whatever on the main screen and not have that be an issue.
I might just test some of these games out at those settings on the Iris 580 iGPU in this NUC and see what happens. but yeah they are not setting the world on fire.
I will have to see how it stacks up. though I do for sure have better hopes for the next revision of both of these. Zen is all ready kicking solid ass in a serious way and it is doing so on great power usage. Vega was a bit of a mess, hope fully they can salvage that and make it actually compete at something worth buying. If they do and then spin a gen two of this it really could be good. but that a two year thing I guess.
Im not sure Vega desktop is fixable, hell there are no AIB’s in site and only Asus has shipped a model. But that cant be officially tested because of video bios AMD is creating. Between updates breaking VBios, no performance increase just improved cooling and less noise, horrid availibility at launch with excuses up the ass and even. Ot delivering chips to AIB’s its a disaster. And these guys wont fix the root issue… power hungry, hot and still doesnt hit a 1080 much less 1080ti
Applications, at least some (not a lot obviously) are becoming increasingly GPU demanding. I mean I am not really satisfied with Intel HD 4400 anymore, I assume Intel did a little bit better there by now though. So a decently powerful iGPU is somewhat of a benefit, and that’s where this iGPU stands.
Well yes we can all agree that some applications are becoming more gpu demanding, but the question is what applications would ultrabook users be running that would benefit from a 10 CU vega gpu? I don’t know of anyone that would want to game on an ultrabook provided a only that 10 CU vega gpu, and a tiny ultrabook screen. And I also don’t know of anyone that would want to say, edit video on an ultrabook screen with only ultra-book power at their disposal.
True, 10 CUs would be a lot of power for that stuff. Personally I ain’t complaining, more is merrier.
As for video editing, I think something beefier than an APU would be helpful, but it might be interesting to see how this APU fares. For the games I play, this APU is actually sufficient (Witcher 3 might still struggle to be “playable”). But that won’t matter since I am in the business of hardware passthrough and I need a dGPU with an iGPU anyways.
Going from Q2 2013 to Q4 2017 yields a massive change in IGPU… depending on the task you get 2-3x the performance out of the current HD630 and UHD630 vs the HD4400. However I suspect that the higher bandwidth of DDR4 memory helps, which will handicap mobile market thats still on DDR3 So-dims to save power, and sadly the unlocked chips are now a larger price premium than in the past too, because you can get a solid amount more out of the IGPU by increasing its frequency and voltage, far more than I have ever managed to overclock out of a dedicated graphics card (apart from the mobile ones… my 9300 GS got to 50% overclock if you put a fan over the laptop and it was plugged in).
As it stands though, with UHD630 graphics your only looking at 30-50fps 720p in last years games (though things like fallout4, DOOM, GTA5 and Metro last light are playable\enjoyable, albeit at low), although older, less demanding and esport titles will play fine even at higher resolutions and\or settings.