Joho the Blog
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August 02, 2004
I've been trying to find out if the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 chipset in the Thinkpad X40 will outperform the Radeon Mobility in my Thinkpad X22. I've looked lots of places and blogged the question, but it's been tough finding any info other than that the Intel chipset uses system memory rather than onboard memory, meaning it can access more, slower memory. IBM tech support had no info, so I called the account manager for Harvard, since I'm looking at doing the upgrade through my Berkman affiliation. The first person I talked with, Eric G., didn't have an answer, but he started IM'ing CJ and relaying his comments. After a few minutes, he put me on the phone with the guy directly. And CJ was exactly the right guy. He looked up my model X22 and told me that my Radeon card only has 8MB of onboard memory, so the Intel should do much better. When I said that the system memory was slower, he said that it's a 333 [insert correct unit] bus, which is not much worse than the 400 [insert correct unit] of modern graphics cards. Also, the X40 has a full megabyte of [something that isn't RAM]. So, assuming that CJ isn't making this stuff up, the X40 should outperform the X22 graphically. I was impressed with Eric's initiative in hunting down the right person, someone who happens to care enough about tech to have looked into all this. And both Eric and CJ were friendly and unwilling to BS me. Posted
by D. Weinberger at August 2, 2004 11:48 AM
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Comments
Dave,
Not to intentionally muddy the waters, but I'm not sure the discussion you had, at least as you've related it here, makes the issue all that clear.
First, I'm somewhat surprised that a PP presentation is all that sensitive to graphics card speed. It's not like it's a 3d, real-time simulation environment. Does PowerPoint even take advantage of any additional VRAM (Video-RAM - memory that is independent of the main motherboard) beyond what the display buffer requires? I'd be surprised if it did. If it does not, as I suspect it doesn't, how much VRAM you have shouldn't affect the "speed" of your PP presentation.
If you have problems with PP presentations being "slow," my guess is the system components that would most improve the situation would RAM, processor speed and HD speed, all of which are independent of the graphics card. And if any recent piece of computing hardware is struggling to present your PP presentation, I'd say you need to look at how you're building your presentations.
Just as an example, if you're including .jpg graphics in your presentation, have you properly sized the graphic for the presentation? PP can "scale" a 3 mega-pixel image down in size to fit an XGA (1024x768) display, but it's still going to be moving 3MP's worth of bits from disk to main memory, then crunching that data to make your smaller image to show on the display. Which is far more "effort" than simply moving and displaying an appropriately "sized" image. So the thing you'd want to do would be to "re-sample" the image in some type of photo editor, to a size and resolution appropriate to your display, which in turn makes it a much smaller piece of data PP has to move around and manipulate. Much like people do when they create images for display on a web page.
I'm going to guess that your biggest improvements in presentation speed will be found in how you create your presentations, more so than in faster hardware.
Posted by: dave rogers | August 2, 2004 01:04 PM
The slower FPS comes particularly in doing things like rotating rasters in PPT. They do fine on my big, honking desktop machine with the high end graphics card, but chunk along (at best acceptably) on my laptop.
I appreciate the excellent advice, Dave. FWIW, I do generally size rasters appropriately.
Posted by: David Weinberger | August 2, 2004 01:16 PM
Dave,
What you need is the Nvidia G-Force FX Go5700.
Jonathan
Posted by: Anonymous | August 2, 2004 05:24 PM