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
Anisotropic Filtering Quality
At IDF last year Intel promised an improvement in its anisotropic filtering quality compared to Sandy Bridge. Personally I didn't believe SNB's GPU was fast enough to warrant turning on AF in most modern titles, but as Intel's GPU performance improves it must take image quality more seriously.
I wouldn't put a ton of faith in these early results as things can change, but AF quality does appear to be much better than Sandy Bridge:
The peculiar radial lines that were present in SNB's algorithm remain here, although they are more muted. Again it's too early to tell if we're looking at final image quality or something that will improve over time. If we are to judge based on this result alone, I'd say it mirrors what we saw in our performance investigation: Ivy is a step towards AMD in the GPU department, but not a step ahead.
DirectX 11 Compute Performance
As Ivy Bridge is Intel's first DirectX 11 GPU architecture, we're actually able to run some DX11 workloads on it without having them fall back to DX10. We'll do a much more significant investigation into GPU compute performance in our full Ivy Bridge review, but as a teaser we've got our standard DirectX 11 Compute Shader Fluid Simulation test from the DX11 SDK:
Ivy Bridge does extremely well here, likely due in no small part to its excellent last level cache. The Fluid Simulation we run looks at shared memory performance, which allows Ivy to do quite well. We're seeing over 3.2x the performance of Sandy Bridge here, and even a slight advantage over Llano.
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dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Most players who game at 1920x1080 also have graphics cards that cost more than $100. That's not what this was testing.kensiko - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Man you won't believe the difference :)Get an SSD with that.
dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
You're going to seriously start wondering why you didn't upgrade sooner. Just don't hurt yourself too much when you slap your own face. Tech has advanced astronomically in the last 10 years.Heck, I'm pretty sure the iPad 2 is faster than your Northwood Pentium 4.
Yojimbo - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
uhh.. i don't think that's true. graphics intensive applications are not the only ones that benefit from fast CPUs.krumme - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Where does Charlie claim to be biased?But i agree, this sacred, aura, "this is not sanctioned by Intel" is a pain to read. It makes thesse articles a little bit difficult to start reading :)
But how profitable, and how good a business do you have if you dont have "good conections"? - charlie uses his for underhand information, anand his to get info before the others. Its very obvious for us to interprete Anands article because we know the obvious, - it have to be profitable for both anand and Intel. But what about Charlie, what is the motives for the people leaking info to him? - its not quite so obvious and transparrent.
awg0681 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
"Sure, he was comparing Intel graphics to Intel graphics, except he wasn't, because he himself threw Llano in there to compare."By the same token, if he had not included Llano results people would be wondering where they were and complaining that they weren't included. Puts Anand in a catch 22 when deciding whether or not to include Llano.
There is validity to the complaint about the numbers being incorrect. Those should be looked at and corrected. Glossing over the results and no mention of Llano being more capable, again, this was mainly to compare Intel v Intel in a preview of their new chip and improvements they've made since last gen. Sure, he could've been more thorough with the AMD v Intel side, but that's not really what this article was about. We could also go to a steakhouse and complain there's not a large vegetarian meal selection too.
Azeraph - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
it doesn't really matter if the igp isn't that great most people don't buy them for their graphics power.I get the feeling that maybe intel is just putting them out there to keep it's base solid against AMD,Not that it needs it and i'm an amd fan. i found something the other day that will possibly change how tomorrows processors will use light instead of electricity.http://scitechdaily.com/penn-researchers-build-a-c...
arno - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
...hi everybody.I'm an electrical engineer, doing intensive "spice" simulations.
I want to know if, as it requires a lot of floating point calculations, does it worth to wait for Ivy Bridge instead of buying right now a laptop with a quadcore Sandy Bridge? I expected Ivy Bridge for March and i've been waiting since last december :(.
To buy now would be very comfortable, as i'm in the simulaiton phase of my project. To buy later, I believe, would make more sense in term of pure performances . But how much sense is the question....
Thanks for sharing
PS (another thing is also theuse of 1600 memory instead of 1333, which might be doing it for another software I use)
arno - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I wonder how IvyBridge perform in term offloating point calculations as I do intensive electrical simulations.I urgently need an upgrade and would definitely go for a Ivy Bridge. But I've been waiting a long time now and Ivy Bridge may again been delayed.
Does anyone have an advice about it?
Thanks for sharing.
Nomorehero - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
How about OC? Info please?Is hard to decide wait until IB or get SB now because the how well IB can OC.