Friday, August 22, 2008
Switchable Graphics
Integrated graphics are the graphics capabilities that come built in the chipset.
- Advantages: Low cost. They are already built in for “free” as part of the rest of the package. Less power consumption (more on that later.)
- Disadvantages: “Shared” graphics memory, which means you lose some main system memory to graphics. Also, the graphics capabilities of integrated graphics chips decidedly lag those of discrete graphics chips.
Discrete graphics are graphics provided by an external graphics chip, usually by nVIDIA or ATI. These have their own dedicated graphics memory which frees up main system memory for other tasks.
- Advantages: Much faster performance. More capabilities for things like hardware accelerated high definition playback. (Yes I know Montevina integrated graphics supposedly has this capability, but Intel has yet to satisfactorily deliver on that promise)
- Disadvantages: More costly and much more power consumption, which results in less battery life.
The major drawback is that this technology uses architectural improvements in Windows Vista to do its magic and will not work with XP systems. There have been many requests to make this so, and the team is studying whether this would be feasible in a future release.
For those of you running XP, you still have a choice. In BIOS, there is a setting for the graphics subsystem that allows you to choose to run in either integrated or discrete mode. You would have to reboot and go into BIOS to change your preference, but could still switch on an occasional basis.
You automatically get switchable graphics capabilities when you choose one of our Montevina systems with an ATI graphics chip. These include the ThinkPad T400, T500, R400, and W500.
