The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review

Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once. This is a DX9 game so it isn't utilizing any of IVB's new DX11 functionality, but it can still be a demanding game.

Ivy Bridge does very well in Skyrim, not able to reach 60 fps but still above 30 at up to 1680 x 1050. The gains over Sandy Bridge are significant at nearly 50%. Meanwhile Ivy Bridge also gets surprisingly close to Llano, bringing the gap down to 10% at 1366 and 18% at 1680. Seeing as how Skyrim is not particularly shader heavy at these settings, Ivy Bridge looks to be largely shrugging off its biggest bottleneck here in favor of pure pixel pushing power.