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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  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Except the quality is the same as competing AMD products if not worse because of driver issues, but you lose 20-30% performance in every scenario versus the last gen Llano APU. The facts are in this very review.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Sure sounds like Bulldozer at this point, doesn't it?

    ""It's just a driver issue, AMD/Intel will fix it!"
    "It's just the review units sent out, AMD/Intel will have a BIOS update at the official release that improves performance!"
    "If you overclock it to hell and back, it can almost sort of maybe compete with Intel/AMD!"
    "Oh look, there's a new update out that improves performance! Sure it's only 1% performance, applicable in only certain scenarios, but it's better than nothing!"
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Aside from that NOT being what I said at all... you do realize you justified the reasoning in your post, right? They're bribing Intel. That doesn't mean they did nothing wrong, it's a BRIBE. Besides, Intel is just as guilty as Microsoft of OEM threatening and hand-holding in the 90s.
  • Makaveli - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Who the hell is this Sans2212 troll.

    Dude please do all of us a favour on this site and STFU.

    90% of the people reading this site know more than you.

    Take your bad english GTFO.

    +1 for ban!
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    If you Google his handle you'll find out he's been doing this for a while now (and that he's probably Japanese, which would explain the poor English).

    +2 for ban.
  • m.amitava - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    I don't think he's serious....reading come of his comments...nobody with a human brain can reason like that...

    If he IS serious, opens up the possbility of creating an online zoo exhibit out of him...prod him with an AMD logo and he'll roar, shout, roll and snap :)
  • tipoo - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Poes law in full swing. The morons are indistinguishable from the people trying to look like them.
  • silverblue - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Awww I missed it... I usually like reading his rants, especially his obsession with "amd craps". He filled the void SiliconDoc vacated.
  • Jamahl - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Wake me up when intel does something interesting again.
  • MJG79 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    2009 - $35B in revenue
    2010 - $44B (1st $40B year)
    2011 - $54B (1st $50B year)
    $20B revenue growth in 2 years

    You wake me up when there is competition again.

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