GRID 2

GRID 2 is a new addition to our suite and our new racing game of choice, being the very latest racing game out of genre specialty developer Codemasters. Intel did a lot of publicized work with the developer on this title creating a high performance implementation of Order Independent Transparency for Haswell, so I expected it to be well optimized. I ran out of time in testing this one and couldn't include all of the parts here. I did use GRID 2 as an opportunity to look at the impact of MSAA on Iris Pro's performance.

GRID 2

Without AA, Iris Pro does well, with the 650M pulling ahead by low double digits. Mobile Trinity is roughly half the speed of Iris, with desktop Trinity bridging the gap.

GRID 2

Turn up the resolution, add AA, and NVIDIA pulls ahead by a large margin. The desktop Trinity part also inches ahead.

GRID 2

Ramp up the quality settings however and Iris Pro ends up ahead of the GT 650M. Desktop Trinity falls behind considerably, likely running into memory bandwidth limitations. Crystalwell seems to save Iris Pro here.

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  • beginner99 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    Impressive...if you ignore the pricing.
  • tipoo - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link

    ?
  • velatra - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    On page 4 of the article there 's a word "presantive" which should probably be "representative."
  • jabber - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    May I ask why The Sims is never featured in your reviews on such GPU setups?

    Why? Well in my line of business, fixing and servicing lots of laptops with the integrated chips the one game group that crops up over and over again is The Sims!

    Never had a laptop in from the real world that had any of the games you benchmarked here. But lots of them get The Sims played on them.
  • JDG1980 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    Agreed. The benchmark list is curiously disconnected from what these kind of systems are actually used to do in the real world. Seldom does anyone use a laptop of any kind to play "Triple-A" hardcore games. Usually it's stuff like The Sims and WoW. I think those should be included as benchmarks for integrated graphics, laptop chipsets, and low-end HTPC-focused graphics cards.
  • tipoo - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    Because the Sims is much easier to run than most of these. Just because people tried running it on GMA graphics and wondered why it didn't work doesn't mean it's a demanding workload.
  • jabber - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    Yes but the point is the games tested are pretty much pointless. How many here would bother to play them on such equipped laptops?

    Pretty much none.

    But plenty 'normal' folks who would buy such equipment will play plenty of lesser games. In my job looking after 'normal' folks thats quite important when parents ask me about buying a laptop for their kid that wants to play a few games on it.

    The world and sites such as Anandtech shouldnt just revolve around the whims of 'gamer dudes' especially as it appears the IT world is generally moving away from gamers.

    It's a general computing world in future, rather than a enthusiast computing world like it was 10 years ago. I think some folks need to re-align their expectations going forward.
  • tipoo - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link

    I mean, if it can run something like Infinite or even Crysis 3 fairly well, you can assume it would run the Sims well.
  • Quizzical - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    It would help immensely if you would say what you were comparing it to. As you are surely aware, a system that includes an A10-5800K but cripples it by leaving a memory channel vacant and running the other at 1333 MHz won't perform at all similarly to a properly built system with the same A10-5800K with two 4 GB modules of 1866 MHz DDR3 in properly matched channels.

    That should be an easy fix by adding a few sentences to page 5, but without it, the numbers don't mean much, as you're basically considering Intel graphics in isolation without a meaningful AMD comparison.
  • Quizzical - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link

    Ah, it looks like the memory clock speeds have been added. Thanks for that.

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