Discrete GPU Gaming Performance

Gaming performance with a discrete GPU does improve in line with the rest of what we've seen thus far from Ivy Bridge. It's definitely a step ahead of Sandy Bridge, but not enough to warrant an upgrade in most cases. If you haven't already made the jump to Sandy Bridge however, the upgrade will do you well.

Dragon Age Origins

DAO has been a staple of our CPU gaming benchmarks for some time now. The third/first person RPG is well threaded and is influenced both by CPU and GPU performance. Our benchmark is a FRAPS runthrough of our character through a castle.

Dragon Age Origins—1680 x 1050—Max Settings (no AA/Vsync)

Dawn of War II

Dawn of War II is an RTS title that ships with a built in performance test. I ran at Ultra quality settings at 1680 x 1050:

Dawn of War II—1680 x 1050—Ultra Settings

World of Warcraft

Our WoW test is run at High quality settings on a lightly populated server in an area where no other players are present to produce repeatable results. We ran at 1680 x 1050.

World of Warcraft

Starcraft 2

We have two Starcraft II benchmarks: a GPU and a CPU test. The GPU test is mostly a navigate-around-the-map test, as scrolling and panning around tends to be the most GPU bound in the game. Our CPU test involves a massive battle of 6 armies in the center of the map, stressing the CPU more than the GPU. At these low quality settings however, both benchmarks are influenced by CPU and GPU. We'll get to the GPU test shortly, but our CPU test results are below. The benchmark runs at 1024 x 768 at Medium Quality settings with all CPU influenced features set to Ultra.

Starcraft 2

Metro 2033

We're using the Metro 2033 benchmark that ships with the game. We run the benchmark at 1024 x 768 for a more CPU bound test as well as 1920 x 1200 to show what happens in a more GPU bound scenario.

Metro 2033 Frontline Benchmark—1024 x 768—DX11 High Quality

Metro 2033 Frontline Benchmark—1920 x 1200—DX11 High Quality

DiRT 3

We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:

DiRT 3—Aspen Benchmark—1024 x 768 Low Quality

DiRT 3—Aspen Benchmark—1920 x 1200 High Quality

Crysis: Warhead

Crysis Warhead Assault Benchmark—1680 x 1050 Mainstream DX10 64-bit

Civilization V

Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance. We're looking at the no-render score here to isolate CPU performance alone:

Civilization V—1680 x 1050—DX11 High Quality

The Test & CPU Performance Intel's HD 4000 Explored
Comments Locked

173 Comments

View All Comments

  • jmcb - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link

    I was thinking the exact same thing.

    I waited long to jump on the dual core bandwagon, 2008 with a C2D 8400. I havent jumped on the quad core wagon yet. Was waiting for them to run cooler.

    This seems like a good time to make the jump.
  • CeriseCogburn - Friday, June 1, 2012 - link

    I'm going to get rid of my 2500K @ 4.8GHz , because it's HD3000 just isn't doing it for BF3,

    and I'm going Trinity man !

    See me and my amd apu on the gaming servers !

    a. totally wanna be cool amd fan
    b. fantasy boy with lunch money from mommie in pocket
    c. bonkers
    d. all the above
  • p05esto - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    Yea, but WHEN can I buy one? Forgive me if I missed that all important detail. My desktop is 2.5 yrs old and am ready to upgrade here. Show me where to buy, lol.
  • Catalina588 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    OEM boxes arrive April 29th. I expect NewEgg will have parts shortly thereafter.
  • tiki037 - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link

    +1

    I thought the April 23 launch date meant that was when we would be able to buy one.
  • Tommyv2 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    Why no benchmarks against a 2700K, you know - a real platform comparison? I'm guessing it's exactly the same performance?
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    Working on testing the 2700K now - didn't have one at the time that the CPU tests were conducted, the difference is small as you can guess, will add results to bench as they are completed.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • Ratman6161 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    ...but really, they already have large quantities of benchmarks of the 2600K and the difference between that and 2700K is going to be relatively meaningless...my guess, not worth the trouble of running the whole suite of benchmarks on it. To my knowledge, the only difference is 100 MHz of clock speed, right?
  • deadsix - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    Any chance Anand that we get a 35W Quad Core processor for laptops like the Macbook Pro 13"
  • Kristian Vättö - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link

    There is i7-3612QM which is a 35W 2.1GHz quad core. Whether Apple uses it is another question, though.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/5772/mobile-ivy-brid...

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now