> Intel GPU performance was totally stagnant from Haswell (Iris Pto 5200) until Iris XE, from 2013-2019. AMD on the other hand was steadily building up their iGPUs

this is what I mean by the unconscious pro-AMD bias that people regularly engage in. not only is that not true at all (Iris Pro 6200 and Iris Pro 580 both are significantly faster), but actually Crystal Well is a very interesting/prescient design in hindsight, it is the type of "playing with multi-chip modules and advanced packaging" thing people get super excited about when it's AMD.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-grap...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/intel-broadwell-review-i...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10281/intel-adds-crystal-well...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10361/intel-announces-xeon-e3...

> allowing the APUs to work together with external GPUs

nobody does that because it sucks. best-case scenario is when your dGPU is roughly similar to your iGPU performance so you get "normal" SLI scaling... ie like 50% improvement. And in any scenario where your dGPU isn't utter trash, it completely ruins framepacing/latency etc.

> and with the 5700g (which imho was a milestone) we finally had 30fps+ for all but the most brain-dead games (alan wake i'm looking at you!)

that's actually because the 5700G is still using the 2017-era vega design, which was not that advanced technologically when it was introduced. AMD dropped support a while ago but the writing was on the wall for a long time before that.

AMD should have moved 5000 series APUs to at least RDNA1 if not an early RDNA2. The feature deficit is significant, a 2017-era architecture being sold in 2023 and 2024 (already unsupported) is just not competent to handle the basic DX12 technologies involved.

Alan Wake didn't do anything wrong, AMD cheaped out on re-using a block and it doesn't have the features. Doesn't have HDMI 2.1 or 10-bit or HDMI VRR support either... and the media block is antiquated.

and if you'll remember all the way back to the heady days of 2017... AMD bet on Primitive Shaders and could never get that to work right on Vega. PS5 actually has a primitive-to-mesh translation engine that does work. RDNA1 still does better than Vega but RDNA2 is where AMD moved into feature parity with some fairly important architectural stuff that NVIDIA introduced in 2016 and 2018.

https://www-4gamer-net.translate.goog/games/660/G066019/2023...

Again, people love to jerk about Vega (gosh it scales down so well!) but honestly Vega is a perfect Brutalist symbol of the decline and decay of Radeon in that era. There is no question that RDNA1 and RDNA2 are incredibly, vastly better architectures with much better DX12 feature support, much better IO and codecs and encoders, etc. Vega kinda fucking sucks and it's absurd that people still simp for it.

The "HBM means you don't have to care about VRAM size!" and other insanely, blatantly false technical marketing just sealed the deal.

But when AMD rakes-in-the-face with Vega or Fury X or RDNA3 it's "a learning experience" and maybe actually just evidence of how far ahead they are...