Notebooks Reviews Technology Workstations

Working, creating and designing on the notebook – the workstation and studio test on portable devices

The Graphics Device Interface (GDI/GDI+) of Windows simply cannot be killed. No matter if it is older graphical applications up to CAD programs or the mere display of the simple GUI of many programs – it is still output via the GDI as if there were no tomorrow. But all Windows versions after XP do not support hardware accelerated output for the graphics functions any more, because with the introduction of the Unified Shaders and the omission of the specialized 2D units on the graphics cards, all these things run quasi through the driver as a kind of wrapper.

The CPU has to do most of the computing and in the end it’s also up to the driver how efficient and with what overhead the output to the D3D is done. The driver models since Vista still support, at least in parts, the hardware acceleration when blinking, i.e. copying graphic contents within the memory. This is where the relatively weak CPU comes into play again in the end result, which slows down the graphics card a bit. But it’s all really fluid, no issue.

AMD and Nvidia follow different approaches here, so that one can see very well which of the individual functions can (or cannot) be better implemented by the respective driver. According to my research at that time in 2009, especially the AMD driver team in Toronto has caught up a lot, because the ATI cards at that time had some blatant disadvantages. Many functions in the AMD drivers still benefit from this today. A current stocktaking shows that they are now quite close together.

AMD is still a little weak on TextOut, while some areas such as lines, splines, and rectangles are pretty much the same, but things like polygons are really going crazy for AMD.

Summary and conclusion

Of course, the notebook cannot and will not completely replace the normal PC as a workstation, at least not with the current state of technology. But the progress is visible and above all noticeable. Due to the ever-increasing shift of computationally intensive and easily parallelizable functions to the GPU (CUDA and OpenCL), the use of the AI functionality of the GeForce RTX, and the increasing prevalence of things like OptiX, the CPU is taking a back seat in many areas.

If you were a bit spiteful, you could accuse the gaming industry, for example, of trying to copy the developers of the production software when it comes to implementing new GPU-based accelerations. Because in the end you almost have the feeling that the relevant plug-ins and firmly implemented AI implementations in the creation and workstation area are coming out of the ground faster than the integration in games, which obviously sell quite well even without them.

In industry and the semi-professional sector, time is of course money in hand, and so most things pay for themselves more quickly as new investments than in the consumer sector, where the struggle for plausible added value is often enough decided by the domestic finance minister as the final authority. Things like AI-based denoising on a laptop make it possible to make changes to projects, show different iterations of a design or simply outsource parts of the design phase to the home office. The advantage of the Intel solution: you can also run an external GPU via Thunderbolt 3, which then offers considerably more computing power on site. With the focus away from the CPU as the limiting factor in the computationally intensive tasks, a kind of modular workstation could even be built.

There is not much more that can be solved with the current studio laptops, but surely nobody will ask for that, because the power limit of portable solutions cannot be completely circumvented. It’s not even about plug-free operation, but about the form factor and the thermal limits of the devices. Here, too, the increase in efficiency through outsourcing to the GPU is significant. And if I may spoil something on the side – Navi 23 will also be available for notebook use. So they say. Together with SmartShift. Which features AMD finally unpacks and which of them will be used in the productive area, we will have to wait and see.

 

 

 

 

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About the author

Igor Wallossek

Editor-in-chief and name-giver of igor'sLAB as the content successor of Tom's Hardware Germany, whose license was returned in June 2019 in order to better meet the qualitative demands of web content and challenges of new media such as YouTube with its own channel.

Computer nerd since 1983, audio freak since 1979 and pretty much open to anything with a plug or battery for over 50 years.

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