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
Intel HD Graphics 4000 Performance
With respectable but still very tick-like performance gains on the CPU, our focus now turns to Ivy Bridge's GPU. Drivers play a significant role in performance here and we're still several weeks away from launch so these numbers may improve. We used the latest available drivers as of today for all other GPUs.
A huge thanks goes out to EVGA for providing us with a GeForce GT 440 and GeForce GT 520 for use in this preview.
Crysis: Warhead
We'll start with Crysis, a title that no one would have considered running on integrated graphics a few years ago. Sandy Bridge brought playable performance at low quality settings (Performance defaults) last year, but how much better does Ivy do this year?
In our highest quality benchmark (Mainstream) settings, Intel's HD Graphics 4000 is 55% faster than the 3000 series graphics in Sandy Bridge. While still tangibly slower than AMD's Llano (Radeon HD 6550D), Ivy Bridge is a significant step forward. Drop the quality down a bit and playability improves significantly:
Over 50 fps at 1680 x 1050 from Intel integrated graphics is pretty impressive. Here we're showing a 41% increase in performance compared to Sandy Bridge, with Llano maintaining a 33% advantage over Ivy. I would've liked to have seen an outright doubling of performance, but this is a big enough step forward to be noticeable on systems with no discrete GPU.
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jjj - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
CPU perf pretty much as expected,GPU perf somewhat dissapointing ,i thought they'll at least aim to match Llano but i guess it is ok for 1MP laptops screens if mobile parts perform close enough (and a couple of big ifs when it comes to image quality and drivers).Any opinions yet about QuickSync encoding quality?
wifiwolf - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
And we should remark that's comparing 2600 with 3700 which have different cpu too.Other benchmarks had significantly better results on 3700 than 2600.
So Anand, how you know that difference is not attributable to the CPU and not to some gpu improvement?
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
You are not being serious, are you? The CPU gets 10% in CPU sensitive benchmarks and GPU gained 40-60%. Even taking out 10%, its still 30-50%, which btw isn't true as games aren't very sensitive to CPU changes as applications do.wifiwolf - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Look at crisys or metro benchmarks and tell me where you find that improvement, at least more than what you find in cpu difference.mosu - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I've tried it on some HD clips at a local TV station and on a big screen it really sucked.It's way behind AMD.We used aHP EliteBook 8460P laptop.Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
At least AMD's products are HD capable.dr/owned - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
My 5 year old laptop with a shared ram gpu is "HD capable". GTFO noob.Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Billions in R&D, double the MSRP, half the power and yet it still can't play Crysis better than Llano, which will be replaced by Trinity in a few weeks. What a crying shame.travbrad - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
Not playing Crysis sounds like a good thing to me.tipoo - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Source or gtfo. Apple got the stock HD 3000, why would this be different?