The 3000 HD is 11% faster.
Which card is faster? (in percent if possible)
I noticed an improvement in performance from the HD3000 in a 13" MBP when I upgraded it to 8 GB of RAM.
WoW went from seizing up in 25 man raids when all hell broke loose to slowing to 5 fps in the frantic bits but not crashing out. It also stayed at 30 fps for much longer while the game got busier.
It isn't fantastic but much better than previously with only 4 GB on the board.
For gaming the HD3000 is severely limited compared with any modern discrete card but works far better than the majority of integrated solutions. This bodes very well for the HD4000 Apple will probably be using the future.
What about the HD 3000 with 8gb of 1866 ram? Since it uses system ram, this would improve performance. I used Xbench for a synthetic benchmark and noticed, not only higher bandwidth in ram, but higher scores with the faster ram installed.
I want someone with the 9600gt to run Xbench and post results, then I will be gladly to post mine as well.
I don't think the HD 3000's motherboard can handle 1866 mhz ram. Even if it could, I don't think it would make up the difference.
You get 512mb allocated to shared video RAM with 8gb total memory installed vs. the 384mb you get when you only have 4gb. You're probably seeing a small boost because of it.
Is there any way to allocate more RAM to be shared with the integrated graphics?
I beg to differ, as I have been running 8gb of hyper X 1866 since August in my 17" i7 2.3.
but, does it actually run at 1866 mhz?
You get 512mb allocated to shared video RAM with 8gb total memory installed vs. the 384mb you get when you only have 4gb. You're probably seeing a small boost because of it.
That would explain the improvement indeed, a 33% increase in available GFX memory is significant but not earth shattering. Thanks for the info.
WoW is very CPU intensive and had a habit of maxing out the used RAM when 4GB was available. With 8GB it has about 2.5GB headroom even when thrashing all 4 cores (2 real + 2 virtual). Blizzard recently released a 64-bit client which seems to have helped performance too.
Check out my thread, I did compares with the 1333mhz memory and the 1866, both memory and GPU tests with the intel hd 3000 and the 6750m.