AMD 780G: Preview of the Best Current IGP Solution
by Gary Key on March 10, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
H.264 Video Quality- SPIDER-MAN 3
One of last year’s trilogy blockbusters came from Columbia Pictures featuring the MARVEL inspired SPIDER-MAN 3. This movie offers bitrate levels that averaged 14.9 Mb/s to 35.3 Mb/s. In our particular test scenes, we have a close up of Spider-Man and another screenshot of the police on the street from a top down angle. Both screenshots offer an opportunity to compare color, facial details, and black levels.
 780G – Click to Enlarge |
 G35 – Click to Enlarge |
 GeForce 8200 – Click to Enlarge |
 780G – Click to Enlarge |
 G35 – Click to Enlarge |
 GeForce 8200 – Click to Enlarge |
We see small differences in the screenshots, but certainly think in the first screenshot that the 780G and/or GeForce 8200 had better color saturation and details than the G35. The second screenshot is a tossup depending on whether you like the softer look of the 780G or slightly more detail and sharpness in the G35 picture. The GeForce 8200 did not offer as warm skin tones in our opinion but otherwise had the same overall image as the 780G. Our test audience voted 4 times for the 780G, 3 for the GeForce 8200, and 1 for the G35 in the Spider-Man image. The 780G garnered four votes in the police screen shot with the GeForce 8200 and G35 each receiving 2. Both 780G images were slightly closer to the reference image than the G35 with the GeForce 8200 placing in-between both platforms.
The 780G and GeForce 8200 put a major hurt on the G35 with average CPU utilization rates around 24% compared to 84%. The GeForce 8200 had slight increases in the processor utilization rates when implementing LPCM 5.1 or Dolby True HD decoding through PowerDVD Ultra 7.3. LPCM 5.1 audio bitrates averaged 4608 Kbps with Dolby True HD ranging from 2640~4608 Kbps depending on the scene.
During heavy action sequences, the G35 processor utilization rates were constantly above 90% and we did experience some judder at times if not outright pausing. If we changed our audio stream to Dolby TrueHD or 5.1 LPCM, the CPU utilization rates stayed at 97%~100% during the action sequences with average rates being around 87%. Actually, judder was no different from the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio stream so we would suggest sticking with the higher audio quality streams but suggest a processor such as an E6750 for a better viewing experience.
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yehuda - Wednesday, March 12, 2008 - link
Yes, these are upcoming Intel boards based on the next-gen G45/Q45 chipsets. Thanks for the link.The thing is that dual digital boards could have been here today. The 780G boards from Asus and Gigabyte too have DVI+HDMI on the back panel. My complaint is that they won't let you run both ports at the same time, even though the IGP supports that.
psychobriggsy - Monday, March 10, 2008 - link
It's really good to see AMD doing something well.Well, apart from the southbridge, but at least the USB2 performance issues are fixed, and otherwise most people will never notice the few differences.
Great chipset for HTPC though. Here's hoping to see what a few more driver revisions can do!
samivesusu - Monday, March 10, 2008 - link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcbGV6Pfb6Q">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcbGV6Pfb6Qgoinginstyle - Monday, March 10, 2008 - link
Thanks for the image comparisons. I think it is about time that somebody showed HD images from actual titles instead of quicktime trailers. Looking forward to the roundup but mainly more image comparisons and quad-core results for the boards. Is a Q6600 on the G35 going to make the stutter/judder problem go away for h.264 titles? Any chance of audio tests with the boards?TheJian - Monday, March 10, 2008 - link
Why would you run a quadcore without a REAL video card? You're missing the whole point of this chipset in that case. Which is HTPC market and the CHEAPO CPU market playing games. This is the best HTPC chipset out there. You can run a SEMPRON 1.8ghz chip as TomsHardware showed a few days ago. That's a SINGLE CORE chip. No need for Dual cores they tested here. IF you have the money for a quad core surely you have $190 for a 8800GT. Why would I want Integrated graphics with a quad core?Ajax9000 - Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - link
Well, one reason is that IGP-to-HDMI is currently the only way to get better than AC3-class digital audio out of an HTPC (due to the lack of OS kernel-level protected audio path for user accessible buses).... which highlights the strange design of the 780G -- the Southbridge can do Intel HD Audio, but the Northbridge is limited to AC3-class audio.
sprockkets - Thursday, March 13, 2008 - link
Or as mentioned L 2.1. Is there anyone that actually notices the difference in audio quality?Hey, I wish someone also tested how the Intel nVidia 7xxx series chipset does. Since it has only one memory channel, it must make it all suck.
Gary Key - Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - link
I have tested this board with a Sempron 64 3400+ and did not have the same results as Tom's with our hardware and driver setup. I am still working on the numbers but the H.264 (AVC) playback experience was not that pleasurable with our video titles. Yes, playback was possible but any system level requests or bitrate spikes above 40Mbps resulted in judder or stuttering. We will look at the lowest common hardware denominator from a CPU/GPU viewpoint in an HTPC focused article next month. We just shipped a 780G board to our Linux editors to test. Hopefully, we can have some initial results early next month.goinginstyle - Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - link
It might be the fact that I can afford a Q6600 or Phenom by not buying a separate video card. The whole point of having a quad is to setup a encoding system that will not take 14 hours to encode a single movie like my Celeron took. I wish this chipset was available for the Intel cpus but I have to admit that my gigabyte 780g board with a 9500 Phenom is working very well right now. After reading about the post processing information, I am glad I bought a phenom. Now I wonder if a Q6600/G35 would have been better if that combo does not choke on AVC materials.