Intel HD Graphics vs APU Graphics

Anyone know a good site to compare the laptop video cards vs another ? kinda like this site for example Video Card Reviews and Specifications - Welcome To GPUReview.com! - GPUReview.com but that's only for the desktop cards. I want to compare laptop cards as well as on board graphics.

I was at BestBuy today and an intel rep was telling another customer that they can run autocad better on an I7 laptop even with the Intel hd 4000 vs an AMD A10 with the 7660 Graphics that has 512 MBs. even though the I7 is a better CPU does that make up for the lower graphics for auto cad ?

I was just in there looking for a laptop for my mom something basic and heard them talk and flipped me out when he said the Intel HD 4000 with the I7 can still get the job done.

 

no. 10 char


edit. Notebook Test, Laptop Test und News - Notebookcheck.com
3dmark 11 gpu hd4000 = 524
3dmark 11 gpu amd = 1057


best buy aint got the brightest individuals

 

any links in English ?

 

AMD Radeon HD 7660G - NotebookCheck.net Tech

 

Here you go:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...ghtweights-amd-7660g-vs-intel-hd4000-igp.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...ager-np8250-clevo-p157sm-review.html#igpbench
(be sure to scroll down to IGP results and expand the spoiler tag for results)

 

In terms of graphics, the HD 4000 is far worse than the better of the APUs -- but the i7 CPU is much better than any of the APUs so depending on the workload, the HD 4000 might be more useful. Note that the HD 5200 is different: it's better in terms of both the CPU and the GPU (and is priced accordingly).

 

While the Best Buy employee was most likely just making things up in order to get you to buy the more expensive laptop, he/she might actually be onto something.

AMD purposely cripples the OpenGL performance of their consumer GPUs in order to avoid cannibalizing sales of their FirePro GPUs. Intel, on the other hand, is not only free from that conflict of interest (they only have 1 GPU, after all) but on top of that is actively chasing that market by getting certifications and whatnot. As a result, I wouldn't be surprised if the HD 4000 is actually faster than the 7660G when it comes to professional applications.

 

OpenGL performance is actively crippled by both AMD and Nvidia on consumer gpu's (even though their professional ones are basically identical - there is no software/hardware issue where 1 consumer based gpu couldn't do it all).
OpenCL on the other hand (or compute performance) on AMD consumer cards is usually much higher compared to Nvidia and Intel.

That said... AutoCAD (to my knowledge) is more cpu heavy, and in the end will basically benefit more from Intel's quad core i7 in terms of rendering images.
For viewport display, Intel HD4000 should suffice (but it won't hold a candle to AMD APU in that regard).

Autodesk software wasn't specifically programmed to properly take advantage of AMD's OpenCL (yet) I'm afraid - they seem to be more focused on supporting Nvidia's CUDA tech, and even OpenCL dependent software add-on like Vray still refused to utilize AMD gpu's (at least, that's how it behaved before - not sure if they made any changes on that front).

Can you specify what you will be using AutoCAD for exactly?
Alternatively, you could try finding a quad i7 with maybe AMD discrete gpu for viewport displays, or a good Nvidia dedicated gpu for CUDA (but Nvidia severely crippled compute performance on Kepler consumer cards compared to AMD which is miles ahead of them).

 

Keep in mind that AMD's OpenCL performance leadership is a very new thing - it only dates back to GCN. VLIW4/VLIW5 were absolutely crappy at compute.

Also keep in mind that AMD's APUs have always been 1 generation behind their GPUs, regardless of the fact that marketing slapped the 7000-series branding on it in order to make it seem like the latest and greatest tech.

At the end of the day, the HD 7660G is a VLIW4 architecture, so I wouldn't hold high expectations for its OpenCL performance.