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:

DirectX11 Compute Shader Fluid Simulation - Nearest Neighbor

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.

Intel HD 4000 Performance: Skyrim QuickSync Performance
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  • jjj - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    CPU perf pretty much as expected,GPU perf somewhat dissapointing ,i thought they'll at least aim to match Llano but i guess it is ok for 1MP laptops screens if mobile parts perform close enough (and a couple of big ifs when it comes to image quality and drivers).
    Any opinions yet about QuickSync encoding quality?
  • wifiwolf - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    And we should remark that's comparing 2600 with 3700 which have different cpu too.
    Other benchmarks had significantly better results on 3700 than 2600.

    So Anand, how you know that difference is not attributable to the CPU and not to some gpu improvement?
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    You are not being serious, are you? The CPU gets 10% in CPU sensitive benchmarks and GPU gained 40-60%. Even taking out 10%, its still 30-50%, which btw isn't true as games aren't very sensitive to CPU changes as applications do.
  • wifiwolf - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Look at crisys or metro benchmarks and tell me where you find that improvement, at least more than what you find in cpu difference.
  • mosu - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    I've tried it on some HD clips at a local TV station and on a big screen it really sucked.It's way behind AMD.We used aHP EliteBook 8460P laptop.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    At least AMD's products are HD capable.
  • dr/owned - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link

    My 5 year old laptop with a shared ram gpu is "HD capable". GTFO noob.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Billions in R&D, double the MSRP, half the power and yet it still can't play Crysis better than Llano, which will be replaced by Trinity in a few weeks. What a crying shame.
  • travbrad - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link

    Not playing Crysis sounds like a good thing to me.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Source or gtfo. Apple got the stock HD 3000, why would this be different?

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