Well, my machine has a i7 4930k, which has no on-board GPU, I use an nvidia K2000 for displaying video.
in the laptop even the old GMA500 drivers are enough for 2D render, if you're playing games then don't use on-board graphics?
Onboard graphics are "good enough" for most scenarios, less so in graphics production and gaming- which only leaves onboard (or on-die) in the mobile platform. And AMD simply isn't competitive there due to power consumption.
I do use on-board graphics on my travel netbook for 3D programming on the go (just as hobby), and Intel on-board GPUs were never a match, specially given their OpenGL drivers.
Intel has improved their OpenGL support by leaps and bounds lately. Mostly because they need a good implementation for Android tablets.
The support is actually better than what AMD has now. As an example AMD has (or had, been few months) a horrible bug in OpenGL compute shaders that pretty much break them completely. Whereas with Intel it works nice and dandy.
But yeah. Price-wise cheap AMD laptop (sub 500€ range) is a better choice all in all. For anything more expensive Intel + Nvidia tends to dominate completely.
It's quite hard for me to picture an enthusiast that pays the premium to get the best single thread performance, does not already own an external graphics card, and is then unhappy with what Intel HD graphics provides but would have been fine with the extra sliver of performance of an AMD APU.
If you're maxing out your processor, both graphics options are either going to be more than sufficient for desktop use or woefully inadequate for games and compute.
Maybe this will change with AMD's recent HBM announcement.
You're spot on. I still game, although not as enthusiastically as I did in the past. The extra horsepower of my GPU probably isn't strictly necessary for what I do, but Tim Allen.
That's a bit of a niche, though. The enthusiast gamer crowd (and other niche markets requiring hefty GPUs) will be using a discrete card anyway, while non-gamers will be generally fine with Intel.
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