The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review

Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression. There are other games that are more stressful overall, but this is likely the game most stressing of DX11 performance in particular.

Unfortunately this ends up being the worst showing for Ivy Bridge. It's ever so slightly trailing the Radeon HD 5450 here, never mind the faster dGPUs or Llano. As we'll see in our compute benchmarks DirectCompute performance plays a large part here, but even then it doesn't explain why CivV performance is quite this low. As a result Llano is once again well in the lead, with Ivy Bridge only reaching some 30% of Llano's performance.