The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Ryan Smith on April 23, 2012 12:03 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
Portal 2 continues to be the latest and greatest Source engine game to come out of Valve's offices. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, and hence is designed to allow games to be playable on a wide range of hardware, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. From a rendering standpoint Portal 2 isn't particularly geometry heavy, but it does make plenty of use of shaders.
Since Portal 2 is another shader heavy game, this ends up being another struggle for Ivy Bridge. Compared to Sandy Bridge performance has once again rocketed up, this time by 39% at 1366, once more indicating just how much the 33% increase in EUs and the improved turbo has improved Intel's GPU performance. At the same time like our previous shader-heavy games it's just trailing GT 520, while Llano enjoys a 100% lead. To that end while we did end up using 4x MSAA at 1366, it's not clear that disabling it would significantly improve performance for Ivy Bridge here since MSAA doesn't increase the shader workload.
It's worth noting however that this is the one game where we encountered something that may be a rendering error with Ivy Bridge. Based on our image quality screenshots Ivy Bridge renders a distinctly "busier" image than Llano or NVIDIA's GPUs. It's not clear whether this is causing an increased workload on Ivy Bridge, but it's worth considering.
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wingless - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I'll keep my 2600K.....just kidding
formulav8 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I hope you give AMD even more praise when Trinity is released Anand. IMO you way overblew how great Intels igp stuff. Its their 4th gen that can't even beat AMDs first gen.Just my opinion :p
Zstream - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I agree..dananski - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
As much as I like the idea of decent Skyrim framerates on every laptop, and even though I find the HD4000 graphics an interesting read, I couldn't care less about it in my desktop. Gamers will not put up with integrated graphics - even this good - unless they're on a tight budget, in which case they'll just get Llano anyway, or wait for Trinity. As for IVB, why can't we have a Pentium III sized option without IGP, or get 6 cores and no IGP?Kjella - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Strategy, they're using their lead in CPUs to bundle it with a GPU whether you want it or not. When you take your gamer card out of your gamer machine it'll still have an Intel IGP for all your other uses (or for your family or the second-hand market or whatever), that's one sale they "stole" from AMD/nVidia's low end. Having a separate graphics card is becoming a niche market for gamers. That's better for Intel than lowering the expectation that a "premium" CPU costs $300, if you bring the price down it's always much harder to raise it again...Samus - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
As amazing this CPU is, and how much I'd love it (considering I play BF3 and need a GTX560+ anyway) I have to agree the GPU improvement is pretty disappointing...After all that work, Intel still can't even come close to AMD's integrated graphics. It's 75% of AMD's performance at best.
Cogman - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
There is actually a good reason for both AMD and Intel to keep a GPU on their CPUs no matter what. That reason is OpenCV. This move makes the assumption that OpenCV or programming languages like it will eventually become mainstream. With a GPU coupled to every CPU, it saves developers from writing two sets of code to deal with different platforms.froggr - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
OpenCV is Open Computer Vision and runs either way. I think you're talking about OpenCL (Open Compute Language). and even that runs fine without a GPU. OpenCL can use all cores CPU + GPU and does not require separate code bases.OpenCL runs faster with a GPU because it's better parallellized.
frozentundra123456 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Maybe we could actually see some hard numbers before heaping so much praise on Trinity??I will be convinced about the claims of 50% IGP improvements when I see them, and also they need to make a lot of improvements to Bulldozer, especially in power consumption, before it is a competitive CPU. I hope it turns out to be all the AMD fans are claiming, but we will see.
SpyCrab - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Sure, Llano gives good gaming performance. But it's pretty much at Athlon II X4 CPU performance.