Zlejedi your standards are way too high, a HD 5750 is definitely not in the lower end of modern cards. The low end are cards costing $50 or even less.

Zlejedi your standards are way too high, a HD 5750 is definitely not in the lower end of modern cards. The low end are cards costing $50 or even less.

That's for 3D. Normal picture can go to 1080p without problems.

Ad1. And they are working on power efficiency - radeon 5770 brings power similar to 4870 at 100W instead of 180, radeon 5870 has performance equal to pair of 4870 in 186W TDP instead of 360Watts.

Ad2. I'd rather prefer if they reduced this gap by increasing performance of low end cards instead of putting leash on development of high end ;) And actually next generation of cpus is doing exactly this. By greatly increasing power of integrated GPUs they give stable base for delevepor to benchmark against and also this will make tons of low end cards pointless which mean GPU manufacturers will have to impove low end gpus to the point when they bring serious performance.

You can't run 3D at more than 1280 by 720 due to how the HDMI 1.4 spec operates. Its not a bandwidth limitation.

Its because the HDMI 1.4 chips (which are HDMI 1.3 with mustard on top) on the market are not fast enough to accept that bandwith. They need to run at 297 mhz or higher.  It would be to costly to mass market the fast ones at this point and 3D TVs are stuck using the standard 225 mhz HDMI chips ...therefore the current 3D TVs are stuck at 720p 3D.

Hence the reason why disolitude didn't buy one yet and bought a 3D projector instead... :)

Apperently there are firmware hacks already which allow games to be played on bluray 1080p/24 fps per eye setting. But its not a pretty sight...

Squilliam is very said, though Squilliam hates all the current 3D implementations. Too much blank time on the current 3D set's glasses makes for a bad experience.

I wonder what clock rates Bulldozer will achieve. I keep reading it's supposed to be a high-frequency design with a longer pipeline (ala Pentium 4, but maybe not as exaggerated). Could we see perhaps near-5 GHz clock rates?

Squilliam may change his mind about 3D once disolutude posts pics of his new setup, and how much he spent on everything...

But the basic issue with decent level performance with the integrated on chip video of Sandy Bridge doesn't change: it still requires consumers to buy a new computer in most instances, or change CPUs/motherboards in all others.

Correct. It's a step in the right direction though.

Naturally, nobody is going to buy a new mobo and CPU for the integrated video solution, so the focus is on the typical consumer that buys pre-made PCs like most normal people.

OEMs will adopt these platforms for pre-builts pretty fast, especially in laptops, because they no longer need to put a discrete card in with all of the expense, battery life drain, cooling requirements, weight and support costs that adds. AMD's Q4 2010 netbook platform will also perform like a 5450 and kill Atom performance wise so the same with that.

Better integrated video shouldn't do much more than drop the floor from under the future entry level VGA card market.

Yes. That will be the #1 effect.

This doesn't matter significantly to developers either since the only integrated video that will run GPU intensive games at the lower end would have to be PCs that were recently purchased. They still have to account for the 99% of the non-enthusiast PCs that predate Sandy Bridge in determining where they can draw the line as to what hardware can play their games at acceptable perfomance levels.

Agreed.

This won't force GPU manufacturers ATI and Nvidia into producing better low end GPU cards; they'd simply stop selling them and position their next tier of cards as entry level while marketing the performance advantages of discrete video cards.

AMD will have no issue with this as all their netbook, laptop and mainstream desktop CPUs will include powerful graphics from next year. They lose no sales.

Nvidia I don't believe will survive. Since Llano/SB kills everything they have under $100, they aren't profiting on anything $200 and up (R&D screwups mean they have no product until late 2011), the intermediate market won't be big enough to pay the R&D costs. I believe they will be replaced in the market by Intel GPUs within 3 years.

But the advantages of decent integrated video performance doesn't change either. Consumers (regular, not enthusiasts) should have to play less of the "can this computer play these titles" guessing game without having to resort to shopping for a discrete VGA card when purchasing a new computer based upon Sandy Bridge CPUs.

And with a guaranteed minimum GPU performance on all PCs (eventually), consumer apps (photo editing, video editing/playback, office, web applications) can start to use the GPU for non-graphics acceleration for a great speedup.