ATI XGP Technology

Hey check this out.

http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/index.html

Does anyone know much about this. Is it any good, I mean does it actually work? It looks quite interesting...

What do you guys and girls think?

 

Well, there's only one brand and one particular laptop that has this tech no far... some fujistu laptop that is arriving in america soon (maybe).

It's still a pipe dream mostly.

 

I would totally love to have that capability in my next laptop. On the road with HD 3650/HD 3200 system, and at home displaying to a 1080p set using the ATi XGP system equipped with an HD 4870. T'would be awesome.

 

Would be even more awesome if you could take the box on the go and use the internal LCD. Granted wouldn't be as good as wuxga on a 24in+ lcd but still nice to play high end games on high or better without FPS drops.

Sadly i doubt this will make it to any real production. It was mentioned months and months ago, and as we already saw ATi dropped hybrid crossfire already. Being as though this is designed to take your portable PC from a CPU/RAM/HDD powerhouse with weak graphics to a semi gaming monster I dont think there is too much of a market for such a device. Personally I would only use it if it worked on the internal LCD which I know it wont, and Im one of the few people that can actually tolerate gaming on a ultra portable laptop.

 

Well once I get my hands on a lappy again (I already know what I want ), my next big purchase will be an HDTV set. Looking to go 720p, probably one of those 32" sets thats 1366 x 768, but if prices for mid-range size TVs are right, I'd love to go full 1080p. Though, I think the HD 3650 in the laptop I'm planning on getting should be fine at 1080p with older games like BF2 (the main one I'm worried about lol ). It ran well at higher settings on my old laptop with a GeForce Go 7200 which only had 2 ROPs. I think the 3650 should be fine since it has 4 of them But doing the math....1024 x 768 = 768,432 pixels.......1440 x 1080 = 1,555,200 eek: ), remember BF2 is a 4:3 resolution game only. So double the ROP workload per frame, but with a scaling number of ROPs to boot

 

According to ATI you can it can use the laptops internal display aswel. So you can take it with you and plug it in anywhere to get better graphics than intergrated laptop graphics.

 

The bandwidth is certainly high enough for communication back and forth between the external box and laptop. I didn't seen anything about direct feed back to the laptop screen, but there is mention of accelerated resolution output of two monitors from the XGP directly, one monitor from the laptop, then the laptop monitor itself (4 total). Obviously the XGP must be shooting data back into the computer in order to keep a handle on all the monitors, including the laptop's unless it's running a la hybrid crossfire.

 

http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/xgp_technology_brief.pdf

If you look at this PDF on page 14 it says that the external box can drive the laptops display aswel meaning you can 'game on the go'.

 

I think the whole point is that you can have an inexpesive laptop with power saving features (i.e. longer battery life) for on the go. But once docked at home it gives you the opportunity to play more GPU demanding games.

If you need something for gaming on the go, then the price of this external feature would more than pay for a similarly powerful GPU setup in a laptop. Some even allow you to switch between integrated and dedicated GPU's to extend battery.

I think the market is for users that:

(A) have an inexpensive notebook PC - it gives them a gaming upgrade path without buying a more expensive laptop for the time being

(B) are looking for power saving features on the go to get better battery life, and won't risk it

(C) when the technology is established and possibly standard port in all notebooks, it gives users of older notebooks another option before having to shell out for a whole new notebook.