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
Intel HD Graphics 4000 Performance
With respectable but still very tick-like performance gains on the CPU, our focus now turns to Ivy Bridge's GPU. Drivers play a significant role in performance here and we're still several weeks away from launch so these numbers may improve. We used the latest available drivers as of today for all other GPUs.
A huge thanks goes out to EVGA for providing us with a GeForce GT 440 and GeForce GT 520 for use in this preview.
Crysis: Warhead
We'll start with Crysis, a title that no one would have considered running on integrated graphics a few years ago. Sandy Bridge brought playable performance at low quality settings (Performance defaults) last year, but how much better does Ivy do this year?
In our highest quality benchmark (Mainstream) settings, Intel's HD Graphics 4000 is 55% faster than the 3000 series graphics in Sandy Bridge. While still tangibly slower than AMD's Llano (Radeon HD 6550D), Ivy Bridge is a significant step forward. Drop the quality down a bit and playability improves significantly:
Over 50 fps at 1680 x 1050 from Intel integrated graphics is pretty impressive. Here we're showing a 41% increase in performance compared to Sandy Bridge, with Llano maintaining a 33% advantage over Ivy. I would've liked to have seen an outright doubling of performance, but this is a big enough step forward to be noticeable on systems with no discrete GPU.
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rpsgc - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
All that revenue, all that profit and yet, they STILL can't bet AMD in integrated graphics.I think that qualifies as a fail.
Thanks for (kind of) proving his point?
dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
They don't really care to. The point of a business is to make money, not have the best products. The latter only gets solved when AMD gets serious in competing with Intel on power/performance again.Operandi - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
The internet called,"stop wasting my bits".StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
You know what? All you do is bash AMD.If you think AMD sucks THAT much and it's engineers and everything else is incredibly bad...
Then I have a challenge.
Go build your own Processor or GTFO with the bashing.
bennyg - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Do not feed the troll.StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Except... Intels IGP drivers on Windows are bad already. They are allot worst on the Mac.Historically Intel has never supported it's IGP's to *any* great length and even had to throw up a compatibility list for it's IGP's so you know what games they could potentially run.
Here is a good example:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intelhdgraph...
Heck I recall it taking Intel a good 12 months just to enable TnL and Shader Model 3 on the x3100 chips.
Historically the support has just not been there.
earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
AMD's CPUs are going to die...sucks to be an AMD fanboy. However, whatever they are doing with their dedicated GPUs, they are doing something right...if they can manage to pull their act together on the driver side, I think AMD would live as a GPU company...earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I'm sorry, but Llano APUs will stay on top for quite a while; Intel is still at heart a CPU, Llano is part GPU...if AMD can get drivers the quality of nVidias, they will most likely do extremely well on that front.zshift - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I really enjoyed the added compilation benchmark. This site has the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks that I've seen, it's a one-stop shop for most of my reviews. Keep up the great work!Jamahl - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Would be great to see power benchmarks of the IGP, especially vs Llano and the HD 3000. Let's see if the graphics improvements have come at the price of yet more power consumption or if intel has managed to keep that down.