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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  • Bateluer - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Until AMD goes out of business. Then Intel gets lazy again, and the price of even a mid range CPU creeps back up above 600 dollars. You might be too young to remember the 500 dollar price tags on the first gen P3s, when Intel had no effective competition from AMD.

    Its not in the consumer's best interests for AMD to die off.

    And, FYI, their GPUs are top notch and excellent, across the entire market. Downside is, they're basically carrying the company right now and that's not sustainable.
  • m.amitava - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    This sans guy is hilarious!!

    Lets prod him a bit more and really get his fanboi juices flowing :)

    AMD is the best!!!!! yaaay....Intel sucks they'll go out of business sometime next week :D
  • 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...
  • m.amitava - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    ain't he cute ? :)...I hope he's not a bot...that would break my heart
  • Galvin - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Please
  • mattgmann - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    it would be cool to see a 4ghz clocked nehalem shuffled in the mix. I'm sure I'm not the only one rocking an i7 9xx wondering how much actual productivity gains are to be had with the new tech. I personally don't like to upgrade until the new gen's retail performance out-does my previous overclocked performance by a solid 15%.
  • svata - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Is the bug with true 23.976 fps playback fixed?
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridg...
  • sicofante - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    I understand that will be part of the new chipsets which haven't been tested here, but I'm also very interested. As a matter of fact, I have a few HTPC customers waiting for Ivy Bridge for this sole reason.
  • vlado08 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link

    I don't find the silence about 23.976 fps playback very promising. This is new chipset "Keep in mind that this is a preview using early drivers and an early Z77 motherboard" .... "Intel Z77 Chipset Based Motherboard"

    I find three possibilities:
    1. They are not going to fix it with Ivy bridge.
    2. They are not ready with the drivers.
    3. They are ready and everything is fine but keeping silen becoause they need to sell old chips.

    It didn't left much. We'll see.
  • Assimilator87 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Intel's always the best, EXCEPT WHEN THEY'RE NOT! Athlon 64. Since AMD's sticking with Bulldozer's base architecture for at least a couple generations, they won't be competitive for a while, but that doesn't mean they'll never be competitive.

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