LiamRayStanley wrote:boblol0909 wrote:
Hardware rendering is usually faster, and seeing as this is not a gaming laptop.
there's your issue. when you don't have a good laptop, software render is the way to go. it also helps on my laptop, which makes it MUCH less laggy. if its a gaming computer would've it be hardware render but crappier computers would have software render? isn't that why they added it to that? i guess is don't understand.
EDIT: and aren't integrated graphics terrible?
No, not all integrated graphics are terrible.
AMD Llano has the graphics chip integrated into the processor, but it's extremely respectable with performance around the level of a 6570~.
You can also drop in a Radeon 6670 and enable Crossfire with the integrated graphics, which will push performance to around the same level as a Radeon 6770 - 6790.
However, that's a desktop chip, but some laptop manufacturers have been doing it as well, the main benefit is how inexpensive they are for the performance.
The thing with Intel however is that over the past decade and a half they have been content in providing IGP's that pretty much only did the basics and even offloading some graphics processing
onto the CPU. For example take the GMA900, 910, 915, 950, 3150, 3100 and every variation in between and you will notice that it doesn't have vertex shaders or a dedicated TnL unit, so it has to offload those
functions onto the processor.
The end result is that the faster the processor... The faster your graphics, which in Intels eyes helped push more processor sales, but they are still marred by poor performance and compatibility.
Intels latest generation aka, Ivy Bridge's IGP has stepped up the performance game again with about a 60% performance improvement over Sandy bridge's IGP, but it's still slower than Llano and the drivers are still poor.
And chances are that the low-end chips IGP's will be castrated like with Sandy Bridge which could do with the beefier IGP as higher-end systems usually use dedicated graphics anyhow.
Conversely... As time goes on the GPU has been put to more use, these days it will accelerate the Windows GUI, Flash, video decoding, Web Browsers the works, I doubt this will change any time soon and in my
eyes, it's worth buying a system with a decent graphics chip to take advantage of that.
On the flip side, building a desktop is cheap, offers an upgrade path to more performance and ultimately even a "low-end" desktop will put most laptops to shame in the performance department.