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

Compression & Encryption Performance Power Consumption
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  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Except the quality is the same as competing AMD products if not worse because of driver issues, but you lose 20-30% performance in every scenario versus the last gen Llano APU. The facts are in this very review.
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Sure sounds like Bulldozer at this point, doesn't it?

    ""It's just a driver issue, AMD/Intel will fix it!"
    "It's just the review units sent out, AMD/Intel will have a BIOS update at the official release that improves performance!"
    "If you overclock it to hell and back, it can almost sort of maybe compete with Intel/AMD!"
    "Oh look, there's a new update out that improves performance! Sure it's only 1% performance, applicable in only certain scenarios, but it's better than nothing!"
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Aside from that NOT being what I said at all... you do realize you justified the reasoning in your post, right? They're bribing Intel. That doesn't mean they did nothing wrong, it's a BRIBE. Besides, Intel is just as guilty as Microsoft of OEM threatening and hand-holding in the 90s.
  • Makaveli - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Who the hell is this Sans2212 troll.

    Dude please do all of us a favour on this site and STFU.

    90% of the people reading this site know more than you.

    Take your bad english GTFO.

    +1 for ban!
  • Articuno - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    If you Google his handle you'll find out he's been doing this for a while now (and that he's probably Japanese, which would explain the poor English).

    +2 for ban.
  • m.amitava - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    I don't think he's serious....reading come of his comments...nobody with a human brain can reason like that...

    If he IS serious, opens up the possbility of creating an online zoo exhibit out of him...prod him with an AMD logo and he'll roar, shout, roll and snap :)
  • tipoo - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Poes law in full swing. The morons are indistinguishable from the people trying to look like them.
  • silverblue - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Awww I missed it... I usually like reading his rants, especially his obsession with "amd craps". He filled the void SiliconDoc vacated.
  • Jamahl - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Wake me up when intel does something interesting again.
  • MJG79 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    2009 - $35B in revenue
    2010 - $44B (1st $40B year)
    2011 - $54B (1st $50B year)
    $20B revenue growth in 2 years

    You wake me up when there is competition again.

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