The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Ryan Smith on April 23, 2012 12:03 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Adding to the load is the use of DX11 features such as tessellation and high definition ambient occlusion, which means it can give any GPU a run for its money.
At high quality with Shogun 2's basic DX11 functionality, Ivy Bridge can't quite reach playable framerates. At this point it's closer to the entry-level GT 520 and Radeon HD 5450 than it is AMD's Llano, trailing AMD's iGPU by over 50%.
Turning our settings down to medium, and thereby reverting to DX10 functionality, Ivy Bridge picks up some performance. 26fps still isn't good enough to reach the 30fps mark, but at the same time it represents a remarkable improvement for Intel. Ivy Bridge is 61% faster than Sandy Bridge here, which is far greater than the theoretical performance difference between the two GPUs. Nevertheless Ivy Bridge still trails Llano by 55%, keeping Ivy Bridge decidedly in the entry level class of GPUs.
What's interesting here is that this is the first test in our suite that is shader intensive at even lower settings. On paper Ivy Bridge has far more memory bandwidth than GPUs like the GT 520, but only roughly the same amount of shader performance. The fact that the two GPUs are nearly tied is a stark reminder of this fact. Ivy Bridge greatly improves on Sandy Bridge, but it still has quite some distance to go to catch Llano in shader-bound scenarios.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
173 Comments
View All Comments
Tujan - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
cause how I see it :" If you're constantly transcoding movies to get them onto your smartphone or tablet, you need Ivy Bridge. In less than 7 minutes, and with no impact to CPU usage, I was able to transcode a complete 130 minute 1080p video to an iPad friendly format—that's over 15x real time."
The majority of trancoding is going the other way- from an ipad friendly format to another friendly type format (device or not). Cell phone to pc,ipad to youtube etc.
I like the concept of the transcode,encode,but as much as with the bandwidth necesary to utilize them they are as they are 'bandwidth hungry'. And here is the first I have noticed that of telling there is hardware to facilitate the h.264 type encoding. "Hardware" to do this.
The screens from all of those cell phones in high resolution 'still'require bandwidth to utilize them. .. and so on.
I dont understand it completely but I'll attempt to stay tuned.
androticus - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
I find this review enormously confusing. You mix IB and SB parts/sku's throughout, without clearly highlighting which is which. On page 2, at first I thought the chart was of IB CPUs, but then realized it was a mishmash of both. Likewise on all the benchmark charts, and I couldn't even distinguish various SB/IB/core counts apart.Was this article written solely for people who have a PhD in Intel sku's ???
Dudenell - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Could we actually see comparison with the i7-920 or i7-950 in there?Pjotr - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Thanks for the Compile test, this is all I look at to decide purchases at work.sld - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
The A8 is conspicuously missing from the 2 charts showing idle and load system consumption. Why is this so?greggm2000 - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Anand/Ryan,According to the article linked below from today, it seems that Intel may be using TIM paste instead of fluxless solder in the IB chips, and if so, does this seem like a reasonable explanation for the high temperatures that people are seeing?
I'm interested in your thoughts on this... and if it's true, and if the article is correct, then Intel deliberately handicapping their chips (to possibly preserve SB-E sales?) is quite troubling to me.
http://www.overclockers.com/ivy-bridge-temperature...
slickr - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
Hi, is this good enough of an upgrade over a Pentium 4 for office, internet and movies?And will the HD4000 beat a ATI x1650XT?
Death666Angel - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Hey guys!Good review overall, thanks for that!
But the Quicksync section was kinda strange. No way that an x86 software solution generates worse IQ than any accelerated stuff. Unless you were comparing IQ with settings that have the x86 do recode the file in the same time it takes the other solutions. Anyway, I don't understand what you did in that section. :-)
kevith - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Great review.Would it be interesting to see how it fared in a series 6 motherboard, now that it actually is backwards compatible?
pwnsweet - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
The only thing I care about is how much faster this new slab of silicon will power though my x264 encoding and that's the one part of the review that was left out!Why anand, why!?