GeForce 8200 mGPU Preview

Zitat

NVIDIA's launch of the GeForce 8200 today puts them in the lead again in the mainstream market, while AMD is gearing up for their own 780G chipset that should arrive in the Q2'08 time frame. As a chipset, there is no doubt that the GeForce 8200 is a worthy successor to the GeForce 6 and 7 series of mGPUs before it. Besides updating support for AMD's latest Socket AM2+, it is also the launch platform for their own Hybrid SLI technology, which we see as a way to address the low graphics performance of these integrated graphics processors.

All these are good on paper, but the one aspect we've yet to evaluate is Hybrid SLI effectiveness - which will probably come in a separate article after the official drivers support is available. From what we've seen, the GeForce 8200 still has some ways to go in terms of driver and BIOS maturity. Performance and heat issues are also a great concern in its present state, and are things that must be addressed immediately.

The saving grace of the GeForce 8200 is its PureVideo HD capabilities, which holds true to NVIDIA's claims of full H.264 decoding acceleration. The trick is to see the GeForce 8200 as a high definition video processor with PC graphical capabilities instead of the other way around.