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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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.