will APUs replace graphics cards ?

Cloud gaming will replace graphics cards.

lol no. Cloud gaming will never replace a graphics card. Who uses cloud gaming? NVIDIA Shield users? And OP, APUs will not replace graphics cards either. You guys may think that all we have are the Titan and K5000, but there are many other things such as a gaming optimized linux and NVIDIA holding on to a beast by a cage.

lol yea. You wont need to buy a graphics card when all the work will be done thousands of miles away on infinitely faster hardware and sent to any display you like.

lol still a big flop on a no. You do know that latency exists. There are alot of mediums that would have to be passed through...

Short answer: No they wont, unless you're talking about basic tasks like emulating pre-ps2 era consoles, watching movies or playing indie titles. Anything that requires significant rendering (your typical 3d game at 1080p) will challenge it.

If you want background information: The advantage of APU's is that they're so power efficient and reduce the "lag" between CPU and GPU communications (the heterogeneous architectures that AMD is gunning for). This efficiency has translated to them replacing discrete graphics in HIGH PORTABILITY devices where people appreciate battery life over high performance. Intuitively, discrete graphics will always outperform APU's since more space = more room for transistors, higher power delivery, reduced thermal constraints and therefore more raw power.

Cloud gaming wont replace high quality gaming since the cost of streaming data over the internet at low latency from high performance server clusters is prohibitive. Meanwhile products like shield still need a PC with discrete graphics to do all the grunt work: they just stream and uncompress data.

Cloud computing will take over eventually, if not that, something else.

Now if we all were korean, and lived in Korea then I'd see potential.

Right now, yes cloud gaming can't be widespread, most countries don't have the infrastructure. But it will be the future. It's not difficult to have local clusters everywhere to minimize latency.

Anyways there are a bunch of threads on this forum already as well as the internet about cloud stuffs. This thread is about apus and how they will never replace dgpus. Igpus will continue to get more powerful as will everything else but gaming will always want higher end specs so will never take over.

Personal streaming like on shield yes, but true cloud computing not for decades. Its forseable cloud computing will work in the near future for gaming on portable low power devices or streaming of simple content. Replacing high end gaming and personal discrete components is another thing since it requires such a high capital outlay for the companies providing the service.

We aren't talking cloud storage where Google/MS chuck in a few hard drives in an array, we're talking about trying to reduce latencies, render and compress content to individual gamers and stream it back to their devices all the while being more affordable than if that gamer bought a discrete component. If it does happen, its decades away.

noo. GPU has a lot of work in a PC

Dedicated GPUs will eventually only be practical for very high end users and professionals. In a few years, the average IGP will be enough even for serious gamers. You will still find plenty of users loyal to graphics cards but that market will be much smaller than it is today.

Will this happen next year, or the year after that? Absolutely not. But the fact that integrated is *theoretically* superior to dedicated graphics leaves dGPU's days numbered.

EDIT: OP, your question really left me thinking about this topic. When one observes what has happened in the past with dedicated components, one quickly realizes there is a trend to consolidate hardware in computer systems. Original IBM motherboards used to have hundreds of chips dedicated to specific jobs. Many of those have all been combined into modern chipsets. And even those are seeing workloads move onto the CPU. Users used to need add in cards for hard drive logic controllers, networking, audio etc. All of which have been integrated onto the motherboard or their respective components.

The GPU is next on the list for integration and we will likely see RAM and hard drives merge logically some time after that.

APUs, like integrated solutions in the past, share main system memory.

That depends, if you're using an AMD APU from Piledriver, Steamroller or Richland architectures then the CPU and GPU are able to address the same memory since they're heterogeneous architectures and the amount of ram dedicated to the GPU doesn't factor in as much as speed.

On intel solutions it varies according to the game. Generally you should be looking at at least 1gb of vram for most games, if you dont dedicate enough it'll just interchange between system ram and the assigned GPU RAM, the performance cost will vary according to the game, the amount of MSAA etc.

Generally increasing the speed of the memory will be a double edged sword, to get it anywhere near GDDR5 frequencies, which most games are optimised for, you have to drastically increase the timing which, put simply, reduces your CPU's performance (not entirely accurate but the easiest way of saying it). So once again it'll depend on the game title and how reliant it is on CPU computation.

What are you looking at APU's for btw? If its high end gaming you're going to need a discrete card still for casual gaming you can get away with it for most titles.

APU's are more efficient (more effective performance per watt and tflop), discrete graphics are more powerful (more tflops).

One day APU's will be so powerful that discrete graphics will be unnecessary for most people, but anyone looking to do decent gaming will NOT find steamroller sufficient.

If it helps, heres a benchmark of games against Intels latest APU's in laptops, you can see that its nowhere near powerful enough to do anything at ultra settings:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4400.91979.0.html

Generally you want to just say it how it is and not confuse people with stating a false claim to "simplify" things.

First, I just have to point out, Apus is an Amd term for Amd's A series cpus. See the "A" correlation? It's just a name and names are just marketing but it confuses people, and that's what marketing does best. Intel has had igpus on cpus since the first i series which for amd was am2+/am3 era which means intel beat them to the punch by 3 years and would be bad marketing to switch over to using amd's term.

Richland is piledriver. Steamroller apus are kaveri. Btw the latest and most powerful intel igpu is the iris pro 5200, not the 4400 and you also missed the 4600 and 5000 which is above that. Intel's top offering beats even amd's best igpu, the 8670d.

Vram for both amd and intel igpus are taken from ram. It seems unclear if you mean only amd shares it but they both do. You can also set both and they both also offer an automatic dynamic amount. It just depends on the mobo bios. I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say "intel solutions it varies according to the game" but both will want similar amounts of vram because what goes into vram is game graphics files (textures take the majority of the space) and these are going to be the same size for the same game. You want a sufficient amount so you don't run out. The issue is the igpu is pretty weak so will have to play on lowered graphics which uses less vram. 1gb is sufficient in most cases and isn't much considering most pcs these days that people would even game on would have 8gb ram.

Both amd and intel igpus are affected by ram performance. Games are not specifically optimized for gddr5, this would imply there is work done on the game specifically for ram speed. But gpus simply perform better when they can get to the files faster. A weaker gpu with gddr5 vs a stronger one with ddr3 will still result in the ddr3 winning. The end result matters, the gpu's real performance which is affected by all specs, vram speed being just one piece of the puzzle. Higher speed ram, may have higher latency but that does not make your cpu/igpu lower performance. Again it's the end result that matters; ram speed and latency are just factors of ram performance which affects cpu/igpu performance.

Anyways was a bit off topic. It has already said by me and others about igpus: they may get more powerful but games requirements keep rising too. They will continue pushing the limits using the highest end discrete cards.

I doubt APU's will ever replace GPU's , from whats currently out there they are complete slugs performance wise, sure they may be ok for a notebook or tablet form , but for PC I believe it will never happen, especially for gaming.

They can put something with similar power in it. But not an actual 7790 GPU.

They can put something with similar power in it. But not an actual 7790 GPU.

Currently the best igpu is slightly below the 7750 ddr3 performance. It's not really about being too good but you do have to keep in mind the die size, pin count and heat. But it's really more about the current market and costs. Making the cpus and gpus separate is cheaper than combining them. You also make more money by 2 sales rather than just 1. If someone is going to game, they will get a discrete card. Having to replace/upgrade just a gpu, which typically happens on a gaming rig, is much easier and cheaper than changing out a cpu that would have both high end, expensive components.