How well are (old and current) Intel and AMD iGPUs working with 4K monitors for browsing?

[cbn]

I am particularly interested in the older Intel (and AMD) iGPUs that came on pre-builts. How well are these working for browser page scrolling on 4K monitors? Is the UI responsive or are the pages hanging when you scroll up and down?

Also when did Display port 1.2 (capable of 3840 x 2160 at 60 Hz) appear on Intel PCs? Was it Sandy Bridge or later?

P.S. Some 4K Youtube video testing I did here using a low resolution monitor and Core i5 3470. Eventually though I will be very interested to see how these various older CPUs handle 4K Youtube Video using the upcoming AV1 codec (re: AV1 will bring 4K Youtube video to even folks with relatively low end internet connections)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is the UI responsive or are the pages hanging when you scroll up and down?

I have to say, with my Sempron 3850 AM1 quad-core 1.3Ghz rig, running Windows 10 1607, with latest AMD drivers, the answer browsing this forum, is a resounding NO.

And that's not even a 6-10 year old IGP.

I wouldn't be surprised if an Athlon II X2 250 on a 780G was faster.

 

[cbn]

I have to say, with my Sempron 3850 AM1 quad-core 1.3Ghz rig, running Windows 10 1607, with latest AMD drivers, the answer browsing this forum, is a resounding NO.

And that's not even a 6-10 year old IGP.

I wouldn't be surprised if an Athlon II X2 250 on a 780G was faster.

Yep, I agree the Athlon II X2 250 is probably faster on Firefox due to the higher single thread (this even though the iGPU is much much weaker) though I do wonder how much better the multi-core (and iGPU) enhancement Mozilla is bringing could close that gap eventually?

P.S. I remember back in late 2014 when I did my Firefox page scroll testing using Athlon 5350 with CPU lowered to 1.3 GHz how it just seemed so bad (see quote below), As I recall even a Core 2 duo (with GMA 3100) was doing better on that same web page (at that time).

Right now I have my Athlon 5350's multiplier set at 13 (So that basically makes my chip a Sempron 3850 with a faster than stock iGPU).

Under Firefox (with Windows 8.1 Pro as the OS) using the Verge homepage as an example, I can definitely report the scrolling less than smooth on a 1080p monitor. It actually hangs quite a bit with rapid scrolling, and this is with only one tab open.

Now granted the Verge homepage is more challenging than other pages (including the Anandtech homepage), but it is not the most challenging web page I have visited.

So I have to seriously question if the Sempron 3850 is adequate for web browsing (in general) with Firefox as the browser.

.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So I have to seriously question if the Sempron 3850 is adequate for web browsing (in general) with Firefox as the browser.

I have to agree with that. Interestingly, I've got Windows 10 on a 64GB SSD, with half Windows 10, and half CloudReady (with Chromium). CloudReady is actually somewhat snappy on the same hardware.

Edit: Both OSes will do 4K over the HDMI output, which I assume is 4K30, because I don't think that the HDMI output on the AM1 platform is 2.0.

Edit: I can test it again, when I get a minute, but I think that I was also able to watch that Costa Rica 60FPS video at 4K30 on my AM1 Sempron 3850 1.3Ghz APU.

 

[cbn]

Edit: Both OSes will do 4K over the HDMI output, which I assume is 4K30, because I don't think that the HDMI output on the AM1 platform is 2.0.

Yep, it would be HDMI 1.4....so 4K at 30 FPS.

P.S. One thing I noticed about older generation Pre-built desktops vs. older generation DIY motherboards is that they Pre-builts (starting at the mid to late Core 2 era) usually almost always come with a display port but DIY almost always did not (DIY usually came with one VGA, One DVI-D, one HDMI until Intel and AMD dropped VGA). With this mentioned, only display port 1.2 approved Dec 2009 can carry a 4K 60 FPS signal).

 

[cbn]

For the (Sandy Bridge through Haswell) pre-builts here are the iGPUs they would have come with:

Sandy Bridge: Locked Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7.....all have GT 1 (6 EUs) with the exception of Core i5- 2405S, Core i3-2105 and Core i3-2125 which have the GT2 (12 EUs). The graphics driver doesn't work with Windows 10 though. Also I don't know if these have Display port 1.2 or not?

Ivy Bridge: All locked Core processors had the 6 EU GT1 with the exception of the Core i7, Core i5 3475S, Core i3-3225 and Core i3-3245 (which had the 16 EU GT2). The driver works with Windows 10 and these should have display port 1.2.

Haswell: All the Core processors had the 20 EU GT2 iGPU.

EDIT: According this Anandtech article Ivy Bridge needs two display ports to drive a 4K panel. Fortunately some Pre-bults of this era did have two display ports (eg, HP Elite 8300 USDT and Dell Optiplex 9010 SFF below):

 

[VirtualLarry]

Interestingly, my G3258 CPUs, overclocked to 4.0Ghz, running Linux Mint (17.3, though I just upgraded them to 18.0 and then 18.1), will do 4K over the native DVI and HDMI outputs.

Which is kind of interesting that it will do that in Linux, because my recollection was that the Haswell Pentiums were limited to 1920x1200 for their iGPUs, and you had to move up to an i3 to get 4K output. Seems that isn't really the case, and all Haswell CPUs can do 4K30?

 

[cbn]

Are the upcoming Intel motherboards (with 300 series chipsets) predicted to have HDMI 2.0 as standard?

 

[Eug]

I'm confused. Are some of you guys are running 4K monitors on ancient iGPUs? Or just the more recent ones?

I'm running a pre-built Acer Aspire X3400 AMD PC, and strangely enough the iGPU is NVIDIA. The reason though is because it's an nForce 720a board. It includes an integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9200, whatever that is. (The name is just 9200, not 9200M GS or whatever.)

With an Athlon II X3 435 things were starting to lag on my 1920x1200 monitor, particularly when trying to load up menus and such when playing a video (like in Netflix 1080p), but all of that lag disappeared when I replaced the CPU with an a Phenom II X6 1055T. Note though, when I had Cool'n'Quiet active on my Athlon X3, things lagged even more often. Turning off CnQ solved much of the lag, and upgrading to the Phenom X6 eliminated the lag.

Regarding the CPUs mentioned, here are the approximate PassMark scores:
~1700 - Sempron 3850
~1750 - Athlon II X2 250
~2500 - Athlon II X3 435
~5000 - Phenom II X6 1055T

I can't run 4K at all though AFAIK. I've been looking around for a Netflix 4K compatible slot-powered low-profile single-slot GPU, but they don't seem to exist. Minimum for NVIDIA is 1050 3 GB, but those generally are dual-slot and full height. The 1030 does come in a single-slot low-profile card, and does support 4K, but does not support Netflix 4K, so I'll skip that and hope one of the next gen AMD or NVIDIA cards will do it.

 

[cbn]

I'm confused. Are some of you guys are running 4K monitors on ancient iGPUs? Or just the more recent ones?

According to my research only 35W Haswell Core i3 and better can run 4K60 on the iGPU. This provided the PC has a display port.

For AMD iGPUs I believe 4K60 started with Bristol Ridge (Carrizo for laptops).

 

[Jan Olšan]

According to my research only 35W Haswell Core i3 and better can run 4K60 on the iGPU. This provided the PC has a display port.

For AMD iGPUs I believe 4K60 started with Bristol Ridge (Carrizo for laptops).

4K@60P arrived in Kaveri (2014). You need a motherboard with DisplayPort though and those are rare, blame manufacturers...

 

[Eug]

I just posted this in my Phenom thread, but I thought it may be appropriate here too.

It seems even an 8 year-old Phenom does reasonably well with VP9 higher-than-HD video. For the YouTube videos I tried, this CPU could usually handle 2160p VP9 playback if left the machine undisturbed, but if I tried accessing various interface features it sometimes might drop frames. However, 1440p VP9 was fine with the CPU utilization peaking at just a little over 50% CPU. This matches the GPU well, since the video output won't handle 4K monitors anyway. AFAIK, this NVIDIA GeForce 9200 only supports up to 2560x1600, which is just over 1440p.

I'm sure AV1 will be a total disaster on this machine, but it seems some people don't think AV1 will really be a viable competitor until around 2020 or later, so I'm not really concerned about AV1 at this point. In fact, 2020 will be the infancy of AV1 adoption, so some of us mere mortals may not really need to concern ourselves with AV1 until about 5 years from now.

Personally, I'm rooting for AV1 to push HEVC licensors to simplify their royalties structure, and reduce their royalties pricing. I tend to keep my machines a long time, and I bought a new desktop and laptop in 2017, built around compatibility for 10-bit 4K HEVC h.265 HDR, via Kaby Lake and Intel Quick Sync. I understand Google will force AV1 onto the world through YouTube, but I'm fine using "legacy" VP9 and even h.264 for YouTube up to 1440p, and using HEVC for other stuff including Netflix 4K. I know Netflix will be introducing AV1 support sooner rather than later, but given that there is almost no hardware support, Netflix's support for HEVC will be around for a long time.

BTW, Netflix has stated that they won't implement AV1 until it is 20% more efficient than HEVC, but some recent testing has indicated that currently this early version of AV1 is actually less efficient than the much more mature HEVC on the most complex critical scenes at this time, despite being at least 10X to 100X harder to encode. They did suggest though that they could implement AV1 in the next fiscal quarter though, and it does seem that some third party testing suggests that on average AV1 right now might be about 20% more efficient than HEVC, but again, if there is no hardware to decode it, it's effectively just really for testing purposes. Furthermore, to achieve that 20% higher efficiency, the encode speeds were 200X to 250X slower than HEVC. Ouch.