Now that the new Haswell chips are out:
Has anyone tried Intel’s new Integrated graphics chips (HD4400, HD5000 etc)?
Performance is supposed to be much improved, so I wonder what this will mean in relation to McNeels recommendation against its predecessors.
Ciao Norbert
Okay that sounds great.
Thanks Pascal.
Don’t read Pascal’s comment that it works well. He specifically said “OK”. The Intel chips are still slow and not recommended, but they don’t seem to crash like the older 3000s do. You would be much better off with a chip that actually supported OpenGL.
Hi JB,
I would like @jeff to chime in here - it is my impression that the Intel 4000 series are actually quite nice chipsets and perform well with Rhino 5. We need to be careful not to let our impressions of the 1000 and 2000 series chipsets tarnish our impressions of the 4000 and 5000 chipsets.
the new haswell graphics are supposed to support OpenGL 4.0 and on the high end are believed to make for a decent gaming set-up.
These chips are two generations after the HD3000 and the performance gain towards last generation (HD 4000) is supposed to be up to 2,5 times as fast.
So they sure should be more than usable for Rhino?
Ciao, Norbert
Well they don’t really make a competitive gaming setup, not even for the money. The best you can hope for as John said is for them to “work.” The new ones are better, sure, but the goalposts keep moving.
I would be very pleasantly surprised if they were good but I don’t have one so I can’t really say, and once burned, twice shy.
Here’s what I do know, the benchmark tests are not to be believed. They are generated by marketing people that want to sell them.
The other important thing to keep in mind is these chips primary purpose is to extend battery life, not to be screaming fast display cards.
It’s like buying a new Hybrid car and being disappointed by it’s acceleration or it’s inability to tow a boat trailer. That’s not what it’s for.
You’re trading off performance for extended battery life. These chips do seem to be getting better for DirectX based graphics, but not for OpenGL so far.
The Intel chipsets (GPUs) are not very good “performers” period when it comes to OpenGL. The earlier models (1000,2000,3000) were plagued with driver problems with OpenGL, and they also failed to support many of the later OpenGL features (2.0+)…and therefore V5’s latest display features will not work at all on those chips.
However, the later models (4000, 5000) do seem to have better support for the OpenGL feature-set… Most (not all) of V5’s display features are supported by these GPUs, but that does not mean that they are now all of sudden good performers. Yes, the features do and will work…but the performance will be significantly less than most other GPUs. In other words… If you have a 4000 and you want real time shadows to display, then you will be able to enable shadows and they will work…but your display performance will drop quite a bit, and will drop more than what you would see when using the other GPUs (NVidia, AMD).
The recommendation for V5 is that if you have a choice between Intel or NVidia/AMD GPUs, then don’t choose the Intel… If you don’t have a choice, and your system comes with the Intel chip embedded (i.e. Laptop, MacBook Pro 13"), then just know that many of the more advanced display features will work, but at a significant decrease in performance.
Hmm
I took a bit of a risk recently and acquired a Surface Pro 2 ( the risk being exactly as stated above, the Intel HD chipsets were being panned on the forum ). Frankly I’m staggered at how quick and capable it is in comparison to my Workstation.
The workstation is an I7 running at 4.2Ghz with a Quadro K5000 and SSD Intel discs.
Running one of my demo models, around about a gig of file size, the Surface is spinning the model probably 70% as quick as the workstation, makes me wonder how much of the GPU capability Rhino is really using ? The only real limitation I see with the Surface is in the 4GB memory space, so multiple program instances are out, although OK on smaller files.
Carrying the thing is like night and day compared to a previous laptop I used to carry to clients. So as stated above lets see some proper numbers on machine capability, let people make informed choices.
Rob F
My HP ZBook 15 has the integrated HD4600, along with a Quadro 2100Mcard. I can’t say that I do too much serious work without being plugged in, but I’ve worked a little bit a battery power and when I do, it seems fairly capable when running on the integrated graphics. No numbers or anything scientific, but it wasn’t so bad that (with my limited use) that it was unusable.