AMD A8-3850 : An HTPC Perspective
by Ganesh T S on June 30, 2011 6:20 AM ESTOne of the main reasons for HTPC purists to override the Intel integrated GPUs was the lack of a proper 23.976 Hz refresh rate. AMD GPUs have a history of consistently supporting 23.976 and 24 Hz refresh rates. With the AMD 6550D, setting up these refresh rates was quite easy.
We have seen that Intel is able to achieve 23.976 Hz refresh of sorts by disabling UAC on Windows 7 systems. There is currently an Intel driver in the works which removes this restriction (and I have my hands on it! Expect to see how it performs when I review ASRock's CoreHT 252B in the coming days).
Back to the Lynx system, setting a 23 Hz refresh rate gets us the same sort of accuracy as was obtained with other AMD GPUs. Playback frame rate locks to 23.977 fps and the refresh rate oscillates on either side of 23.977 Hz. Instead of a repeated frame every 42 seconds, we get one every 1000 seconds, long enough for most people not to notice.
24 Hz refresh rate support is equally good.
We would like AMD to provide custom resolution and refresh rate support similar to what NVIDIA does. This would enable end users to tweak the pixel clock and related settings to appropriately match their setup.
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Galcobar - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
Well, if Anandtech is so deeply in Intel's pocket, Intel might want their money back if the corporation were to read all the accusations of bias against Intel SSDs when Anandtech reviews an OCZ drive and concludes it's faster if less reliable.Well, as my journalism profs said, if everyone's angry at you, you're doing your job.
Musafir_86 - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
Hi Ganesh,-Thanks for the article. As per your reply to me in the preceding article (by Anand), besides video quality, where are the comparison for gaming? Or am I wrong to expect image quality (IQ) comparison for 3D games here?
Thanks again.
ganeshts - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
I misunderstood your original request for IQ testing. I thought it was for video playback.As for 3D games, I am not the right person since I don't play any games at all (except for running benchmarks). Let me ping a few people in our team and see if we can get that done and posted in a follow-up.
Musafir_86 - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
-Okay, I will be waiting for it then. :DRegards.
jabber - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
A tip re. integrated graphics. All the PCs and laptops I get in with such setups all have The Sims installed.Can we have a Sims benchmark. Just saying as it would actually be a benchmark relevant to folks that actually use such machines.
I dont need to know it will only do 6fps with Crysis. I kinda know that.
mindbomb - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
i think the bug you are experiencing is related to the evr cp renderer. If you use an updated build, this should go away.ganeshts - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
Yes, I did find that on the MPC-HC IRC channel. But, the difference between BD-ISO and M2TS using TMT itself remains unexplained. The driver does lots of 'invisible' post processing when using EVR, so there is no reason why AMD didn't do that in this case.puretech - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
I truly hope that software developers takes the Fusion platform at this CPU performance level seriously. For many years now higher performance CPUs has not been needed by 99.5% of the consumers. It's not even possible anymore to to get the kids of today to understand what actually was possible to do already with a 486 based system 20 years ago, and the major problems even back then were slow disk I/O and poor graphics performance, not the CPU itself. Since then software development has only been for the highest CPU performance leading to sloppy programming and non-existent optimization, forcing people to upgrade the hardware to stay on "contemporary" operating systems. This review says more about the operating system and the application developers than the Fusion platform.ganeshts - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
I think the problem is more with the drivers rather than the Fusion GPU itself. But, that said, the drivers are themselves a part of the Fusion platform.Dobs - Saturday, July 9, 2011 - link
Since every other site is finding these hum with more memory & bandwidth, please retest with 8GB of 1866 Ram.And can the default GFX memory of 512 MB be increased to 1024 or 2048? What happens to the benchmarks then?
Thanks
Dobs