The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 6, 2012 8:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Ivy Bridge
Discrete GPU Gaming Performance
Gaming performance with a discrete GPU does improve in line with the rest of what we've seen thus far from Ivy Bridge. It's definitely a step ahead of Sandy Bridge, but not enough to warrant an upgrade in most cases. If you haven't already made the jump to Sandy Bridge however, the upgrade will do you well.
Dragon Age Origins
DAO has been a staple of our CPU gaming benchmarks for some time now. The third/first person RPG is well threaded and is influenced both by CPU and GPU performance. Our benchmark is a FRAPS runthrough of our character through a castle.
Dawn of War II
Dawn of War II is an RTS title that ships with a built in performance test. I ran at Ultra quality settings at 1680 x 1050:
World of Warcraft
Our WoW test is run at High quality settings on a lightly populated server in an area where no other players are present to produce repeatable results. We ran at 1680 x 1050.
Starcraft 2
We have two Starcraft II benchmarks: a GPU and a CPU test. The GPU test is mostly a navigate-around-the-map test, as scrolling and panning around tends to be the most GPU bound in the game. Our CPU test involves a massive battle of 6 armies in the center of the map, stressing the CPU more than the GPU. At these low quality settings however, both benchmarks are influenced by CPU and GPU. We'll get to the GPU test shortly, but our CPU test results are below. The benchmark runs at 1024 x 768 at Medium Quality settings with all CPU influenced features set to Ultra.
Metro 2033
We're using the Metro 2033 benchmark that ships with the game. We run the benchmark at 1024 x 768 for a more CPU bound test as well as 1920 x 1200 to show what happens in a more GPU bound scenario.
DiRT 3
We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:
Crysis: Warhead
Civilization V
Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance. We're looking at the no-render score here to isolate CPU performance alone:
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krumme - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Well the dilemma for Anand is apparent. If he stops writing those previews that is nice to Intel, someone else will get the oportunity and all the info. He can write two bad previews and the info and early chips just stops comming. Intel and Anand have a business to run, and there is a reason Intel gives Anand the chips (indirectly).He have a "deal" with Intel, the same way we have a deal with Anand when we read the review. We get the info - bended/biased - and then we can think ourselves. I think its a fair deal :) - we get a lot of good info from this preview. The uninformed gets raped, but its alway like that. Someone have to pay for the show.
chemist1 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
The Macbook Pro, for instance, has a discrete GPU, yet can switch to the chip-based GPU to save power when on battery. So having a better chip-based GPU makes sense in this context.Sabresiberian - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I'd like to see the discreet graphics card industry make the kind of progress, relatively speaking, Intel has made in the last 2 years.Ivy Bridge is a ways from competing with a high-end discreet solution, but if the relative rates in progress don't change, Intel will catch up soon.
sixtyfivedays - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I use the iGPU on my build for my second monitor and it is quite nice.I can watch HD videos on it and it doesn't take away from my dedicated GPU at all.
mlkmade - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Is that even possible? Special hack or software?When you install a discrete graphics card, the integrated gpu gets disabled.
Would love to know how you accomplished this..Is it a desktop or laptop?
mathew7 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
"When you install a discrete graphics card, the integrated gpu gets disabled."It was exclusive in northbridge-IGP units (Core2Duo/Quad and older). With Core-i, it's by default disabled but can be enabled through BIOS (of course if you don't have a P5x/6x chipset).
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
1. How much faster is Ivy Bridge at single thread versus my Conroe@3GHz?2. How much faster is my GTX560Ti than HD4000?
dr/owned - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
1) Your 65 nm cpu would get the shit blow out of it by IB at the same clock speed in single threaded applications. Assuming 15% improvements in each of the tick-tocks since Conroe, a 1.8 Ghz IB would probably be about the same as a 3 Ghz Conroe.2) Discrete graphics vs. integrated graphics. Intel isn't trying to compete here so it's a stupid comparison.
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
1. Your "get the shit blown out" is worthless. All I'm looking for is a number, and your effective answer is +67%.2. It's not a stupid comparison, because:
a) I'm interested.
b) HD4000 is designed for games.
c) They benchmarked with modern games.
d) Games are designed around people's performance.
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
1. Another website shows the i7 3770K scored 2643 on the Fritz Chess Benchmark with 1 processor. My machine does 2093. That's only 26% different.2. I very roughly estimate the GTX560Ti might be 5-6x faster than the HD4000.
It'd be useful to see a real comparison of these though.