The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 6, 2012 8:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Ivy Bridge
Anisotropic Filtering Quality
At IDF last year Intel promised an improvement in its anisotropic filtering quality compared to Sandy Bridge. Personally I didn't believe SNB's GPU was fast enough to warrant turning on AF in most modern titles, but as Intel's GPU performance improves it must take image quality more seriously.
I wouldn't put a ton of faith in these early results as things can change, but AF quality does appear to be much better than Sandy Bridge:
The peculiar radial lines that were present in SNB's algorithm remain here, although they are more muted. Again it's too early to tell if we're looking at final image quality or something that will improve over time. If we are to judge based on this result alone, I'd say it mirrors what we saw in our performance investigation: Ivy is a step towards AMD in the GPU department, but not a step ahead.
DirectX 11 Compute Performance
As Ivy Bridge is Intel's first DirectX 11 GPU architecture, we're actually able to run some DX11 workloads on it without having them fall back to DX10. We'll do a much more significant investigation into GPU compute performance in our full Ivy Bridge review, but as a teaser we've got our standard DirectX 11 Compute Shader Fluid Simulation test from the DX11 SDK:
Ivy Bridge does extremely well here, likely due in no small part to its excellent last level cache. The Fluid Simulation we run looks at shared memory performance, which allows Ivy to do quite well. We're seeing over 3.2x the performance of Sandy Bridge here, and even a slight advantage over Llano.
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Zoomer - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
It would have been interesting to see. Personally, I don't care for IGP, as they sit disabled anyway. Right now, it seems like it's a 7% clock for clock perf increase, which is very poor for one process node. Knowing where the clocks can be will let everyone know exactly how much faster the CPU can be over SB.NeBlackCat - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
For me, the most interesting things about IVB are improved multi-monitor support, and power savings not just at stock, but also undervolted (stock clock) and overclocked.Because I want to know if I'm finally going to get that laptop or mini-itx system that can drive several monitors while remaining cool and sipping power, even under load.
Not covered at all. Shame.
beck2050 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Intel marches on. Their domination of 80+% of all CPU markets will continue.silverblue - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
PC and especially server market, sure, but not smartphone/tablet. Not yet, anyway.fvbounty - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Should have a had SB 2700K to run clock for clock against the 3770K and see if there's much difference!ellarpc - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Agreed! I was just about to post that same comment. It doesn't make much sense to compare it to a lower clocked SB product. Well unless you wanted to make the IB look better. Now I'm going to sift through anand's past reviews to see what kind of gains the 2700 has over the 2600.ellarpc - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Doesn't look like Anand has a 2700k for testingueharaf - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I was thinking that the difference in gpu perfomance between HD3000 and HD4000 about 20% to 40% increase perfomance, will remain in the ivy-bridge mobile chips!!! I hope soo!!!lilmoe - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Great review. You guys know your stuff. I've been waiting for a review like this since IvyBridge was announced.However, I'll still "cling to my Core 2" since it does the job now, and I'll postpone my upgrade till next year. You make it seem like Haswell is a good reason to wait. I bought the system in early 2010, and I usually upgrade every 2-4 years. 3 years sounds just right. I'll be investing in SSDs since you talked me into it though, it seems a better upgrade at the moment.
Breach1337 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Did Intel specifically ask not to include overclocking tests in ES previews?