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Hi! Needed a new laptop quickly and as I was with a very tight budget I ended up with this (280?) from amazon.de. I thought it would be cool to share some quick thoughts about how does this frankly a little strange configuration work under Mesa and ask a few questions.
Strange for one the iGPU HD8650g seems to be the faster GPU and that's while the system has just 4GB (DDR3 1600Mhz) of ram for now (I'm going to upgrade it to at least 2x4GB 1866mhz later). The dGPU HD8570M does have 2GB of its own memory but its crippled by a 64-bit wide bus (though in a single channel configuration so is HD8650g).
First of all I tried with Catalyst drivers because I've been under the impression that they work pretty well these day on the newer hardware. Well it wasn't so. Team Fortress 2 showed mouse lag (heavy throttling maybe..?) especially with dGPU and performance was pretty much unplayable with (1366x768, all High,4xAA,4xAF) after awhile heavy artifacting began so I gave up and removed Catalyst. Tried again with up-to-date Mesa goodness and what a relief it was! With HD8650g not only it was great to see that the game runs well with very playable frame rate but without any glitching, artifacting and so on. The HD8570M (DRI_PRIME=1) was better too! Not as quite as fast as the other but close and glitch free also.
I'm going to do proper benchmarking later on. Have many more games to install and try just for the hell of it. Just wanted to share this quickly. I have to ask though that do you think the HD8570M (GCN, 320sp) is eventually with a more mature drivers going to be faster than the HD8650g(VLIW4, 368sp) thanks to it's newer architechture/voodoo?
Strange for one the iGPU HD8650g seems to be the faster GPU and that's while the system has just 4GB (DDR3 1600Mhz) of ram for now (I'm going to upgrade it to at least 2x4GB 1866mhz later). The dGPU HD8570M does have 2GB of its own memory but its crippled by a 64-bit wide bus (though in a single channel configuration so is HD8650g).
First of all I tried with Catalyst drivers because I've been under the impression that they work pretty well these day on the newer hardware. Well it wasn't so. Team Fortress 2 showed mouse lag (heavy throttling maybe..?) especially with dGPU and performance was pretty much unplayable with (1366x768, all High,4xAA,4xAF) after awhile heavy artifacting began so I gave up and removed Catalyst. Tried again with up-to-date Mesa goodness and what a relief it was! With HD8650g not only it was great to see that the game runs well with very playable frame rate but without any glitching, artifacting and so on. The HD8570M (DRI_PRIME=1) was better too! Not as quite as fast as the other but close and glitch free also.
I'm going to do proper benchmarking later on. Have many more games to install and try just for the hell of it. Just wanted to share this quickly. I have to ask though that do you think the HD8570M (GCN, 320sp) is eventually with a more mature drivers going to be faster than the HD8650g(VLIW4, 368sp) thanks to it's newer architechture/voodoo?
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