ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 vs Intel Extreme Graphics 2

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570

The ATI Mobilty Radeon HD 4570 from AMD is a DirectX 10.1 lower to mid range notebook graphics adapter. Technically it is a faster clocked Mobility Radeon 4530/4330. The successor Mobility Radeon HD 5450 features the same performance at a lower power consumption and DirectX11 capabilities.

AMD specifies a slow 64 Bit memory bus, but some GPU-Z variants state a 128 Bit bus (this is an error in the GPU-Z database).

The gaming performance of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 should be very similar to the desktop HD 4550 which features similar specifications. Modern and demanding games of 2009 like COD MW 2 or Risen only run in low details and resolutions fluently. Some may not even run fluently at all (e.g. Crysis and NFS Shift depending on the CPU). Older or less demanding games like Left 4 Dead should even run in high detail settings. More information can be found in the gaming benchmark section below.

The Mobility HD 4570 is based on the RV710 chip and features 80 stream processors (16 5-dimensional shader cores). These cores do the graphic work of the shader- and pixel pipelines of older GPUs. The stream processors are also called ALUs and are grouped in five-way VLIW units. Each of the five instructions of a VLIW bundle has to be independent from the others and therefore the performance depends on the optimization of the driver.

A speciality of the Radeon HD 4570 is the possibility to use ordinary DDR2 and DDR3 graphic memory (as a cheaper alternative to GDDR3). However, cards that use that kind of memory will be slower than others equipped with GDDR RAM.

The Mobility Radeon HD 4570 includes the Avivo HD called video technology including an onboard soundchip for 7.1 sound output over HDMI or DisplayPort and the 2nd generation UVD (Unified Video Decoder). This UVD 2 supports full bitstream decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 streams. In addition to this, it also supports dual video stream decoding and Picture-in Picture mode which makes the UVD full BD-Live compliant. Simplified, the Avivo HD technology handles all video tasks and enables the GPU to decode HD videos.

AMD published a power consumtion of about 12-15 Watt for the HD 4570. Still it is unclear if this value represents the chip alone or the whole mxm board including the memory (which would include about 5 Watt).

Compared to the desktop ATI Radeon HD 4550, the mobile 4570 features a higher core clock (680 versus 600) and therefore performs a bit better than the desktop 4550 (if the notebook manufacturer uses GDDR3 memory).

Intel Extreme Graphics 2

The Intel Extreme Graphics 2 is an integrated (onboard) graphic chip with shared memory on the Intel 852 / 855 GM, GME, GMV chipsets for Centrino, Pentium 4 and Celeron based laptops. The 3D performance is very low and therefore the graphics card is not suited for 3D games. For example the 3D Mark 05 does not start due to the lack of pixel shader support. Furthermore, the card does not support Windows Aero in Vista and Windows 7.