FPSLabs : Intel reacts to NVIDIA’s GPU declaration, fires blanks

Intel reacts to NVIDIA’s GPU declaration, fires blanks

Posted by rcervantes in March 21st, 2008

Last week we brought you a story regarding a piece of software that NVIDIA will be launching in the near future. This software is designed to basically show how a GPU upgrade will produce a more substantial performance increase than a CPU upgrade. To quote our earlier article, “This software is supposed to show that a low-end CPU paired with a powerful GPU will perform better than a high-end CPU paired with a budget GPU.”

Now, information has hit the web claiming Intel has been distributing their counter arguments to various critical manufacturers. We managed to get a hold of this information before it was taken down, and to be perfectly honest, the points that Intel makes are pretty blunt. One of the major things working against Intel in their propaganda is the fact that they are really going after the mainstream consumer, whereas NVIDIA is clearly targeting more of the budget gaming audience. Furthermore, the performance benefits that Intel uses as a foundation for their arguments are all CPU tasks in the first place. Intel is claiming that a processor upgrade will suit the consumer better in operations that take place on the CPU only. Of course it does. There also seems to be a fair amount of trickery in the numbers game, where Intel quotes 0% performance gains in CPU tasks after adding a discrete graphics card to the system. With these foils, it would seem as though Intel is trying to completely discount the importance of discrete graphics when it comes to system performance. Granted, none of this is particularly new considering Intel’s history of spitting out very sided information. We are left wondering, though, why Intel even felt it necessary to counter NVIDIA’s GPU superiority claims.

One possible explanation for this is that current high-end game engines are not optimized to run on expensive, quad-core processors. While benchmarks typically show that quad-core processors increase performance in pretty much all applications, the advantages are relatively small when compared to a comparable graphics card upgrade. Intel might be working with game developers to get multi-core processing coded seemlessly into current and next-gen engines, but in the meantime it seems they are trying to promote the benefits of more powerful processors in tasks other than games.

In the foils, Intel does quote fairly significant performance increases in several games. It does not say anything about the resolution they used to test these games, but from our past experience with scaling in games from on processor frequency increases, it is probable that the tests were CPU limited. While the fact that they actually used a couple of games to prove their point ears Intel some brownie points, if they really did use low resolutions tests like we expect then the numbers say absolutely nothing about the importance of the GPU. Along these same lines, the 3DMark06 results reported are those of the CPU score only. This certainly raised eyebrows around the office when we read it, considering the CPU score in 3DMark06 has absolutely nothing to do with graphics.

Also interesting to note are the recent reports that the real reason for all of Microsoft’s “Vista Capable” woes was pressure from Intel. We have no proof of these claims and for all we know they could be unsubstantiated, but apparently Intel’s 945G chipset was included in Microsoft’s “Vista Capable” marketing campaign two years ago when it actually was not “capable” of running “Vista”. Finally, there has been loads of news lately regarding Intel’s upcoming Larrabee discrete GPU solution. This makes us wonder why Intel want to discount the importance of the GPU when they are presumably pouring loads of money into development of their own discrete graphics solution.

The slides were taken down from the initial site we got them from, but we definitely expect they will be popping up again sooner or later. Pretty much everyone already knows that Intel processors are currently the best for gaming, which is why we were puzzled to read this information bashing the other side of the gaming performance story. Also, not once in these slides did Intel directly call out NVIDIA, but that was the sense that we got; we could be wrong.

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