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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fic2 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I totally agree. Intel is again going to cobble the lower end with the HD2500 graphics so that people that don't need the i7 cpu have to buy a discrete video card. I really wish review sites would hammer Intel for this and pressure them to include the better integrated graphics. It's not like the HD4000 is so good that people will buy an i7 just for the graphics.Jamahl - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
HD4000 takes up more die space which means it costs them more. That's all intel cares about, they don't give a shit about what people need at the lower end.They were forced to start using HD3000 graphics in all their lower end chips because of Llano. The 2105 basically replaced the 2100 at the same money so they would be less embarrassed by Llano. That's what competition does.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I like this tick. The CPU performance goes up by as much as I expected and the iGPU side goes up significantly.If I had the spare change to throw around, I'd upgrade from my 3.8GHz i7 860. But as it is now, an upgraded CPU wouldn't do much for me in terms of gaming performance and I rarely do CPU intensive tasks these days. The chipset and native USB 3.0 are nice, but I'll wait for Haswell next year and get a good GPU or two instead.
tiro_uspsss - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I'm a little confused :/the 3770K consistently beat the 3820 (by a very small margin)
*wait*
oh.. I found out why.. the specs of the 3820 as listed in the 'line up' are incorrect - the 3820 'only' turbos to 3.8 not 3.9.. is this why the 3770K did a little better?
aside from the small extra turbo that the 3770K has, the 3820 has more L3, more memory channels & a higher core clock (that's if the core clock listed for the 3770K is correct)
soooo.. the extra turbo.. is that why the 3770K is slightly better all-round?
Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
You know that they are different CPU generations, right? One is SNB-E on a 32nm process node and the other is IVB on a 22nm node. The review said that IVB has a 5-15% higher IPC.tiro_uspsss - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
*slaps own forehead* DUH! thats right! I forgot! :D I knew I was forgetting something! :P :D thanks! makes sense now! :)BSMonitor - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
The number scheme is misleading.3820 and up are SNB-E.
3770K is Ivy Bridge.
An IVB core will perform better than a SNB core clocked at the same speed.
New architecture wins over cache, memory channels, clock speed.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
"Generational performance improvements on the CPU side generally fall in the 20 - 40% range. As you've just seen, Ivy Bridge offers a 7 - 15% increase in CPU performance over Sandy Bridge - making it a bonafide tick from a CPU perspective. The 20 - 40% increase on the graphics side is what blurs the line between a conventional tick and what we have with Ivy Bridge.""Being able to play brand new titles at reasonable frame rates as realistic resolutions is a bar that Intel has safely met."
hansmuff - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
The review is good, I really like that you added the compilation benchmark for chromium -- good job!I'm a little disappointed in the lack of overclocking information. What is the point of reviewing the K edition of this chip without even doing a simple overclock with a comparison to 2600K in terms of power draw and heat?
Silenus - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
That is because this is NOT a review...it's just a preview. I'm sure they will do some overclocking testing in the full review later. Those results would be more meaningful then anyway as this is still early hardware/drivers.