You know i kinda like this feature, and looking at how next year PC tech will be spent on IGP chipsets rather than CPU perf upgrades, whats stopping AMD/Nvidia and even Intel to make the above feature fully standard? As much as HD5870 reduces idle consumption to 30w but ... a 55nm/40nm IGP should go lower, gives out less heat and becomes less noisy....and would make users feel that the chipset in their motherboard is paid to work rather than disabling it once you install a GPU....really techie feature.
Is it hardware costs of adding more traces of transistors? Is it at the drivers level? Or is it Windows problem? Can we totally turn off a GPU and move all load to the IGP in 2D desktop and only turn on the GPU when launching a 3D game..the IGP will go to low power state for fast alt-tabbing (which is slow for AMD GPU)...you know dual desktop rendered ? I think some Apple NV macbooks did this. Windows 7 support dual GPU ya rite?
Is it hardware costs of adding more traces of transistors? Is it at the drivers level? Or is it Windows problem? Can we totally turn off a GPU and move all load to the IGP in 2D desktop and only turn on the GPU when launching a 3D game..the IGP will go to low power state for fast alt-tabbing (which is slow for AMD GPU)...you know dual desktop rendered ? I think some Apple NV macbooks did this. Windows 7 support dual GPU ya rite?
