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
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it was the first AAA DX10+ game. Consequently it makes no attempt to shy away from pushing the graphics envelope, and pushing GPUs to their limits at the same time. Even at low settings Battlefield 3 is a handful, and to be able to run it on an iGPU would no doubt make quite a few traveling gamers happy.
So does Ivy Bridge reach its goal here? Kind of. 37.3 is playable in single player, but it's been in our experience that multiplayer framerates can bottom out at half our SP benchmark, which means Ivy Bridge would be bottoming out in the high teens.
All things considered however, this is another case of Intel greatly improving their performance. Compared to Sandy Bridge, Ivy bridge is 48% faster, once again well ahead of the clockspeed and EU count improvements for HD 4000. Intel's improved shader performance plays a large part here, but BF3 provides a good mix of shading, texturing, and geometry stress at low settings, meaning Ivy Bridge is getting a full workout. As a result it's also once again closing the gap on Llano, trailing AMD's iGPU by only 25% here.
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cjb110 - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Considering that on most games both the Xbox and PS 3tend to be sub 720p, the iGPU in Ivy Bridge is impressive. Has anybody compared the 3?tipoo - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
You have a unified shader GPU with similar performance to the x1900 series but more flexible, and something like a Geforce 7800 with some parts of the 7600 like lower ROPs and memory bandwidth...7 years later, if even an IGP didn't beat those, it would be pretty sad. Those were ~200gflop cards, todays top end is over 3000, a lower-mid range chip like this I would expect to be in the upper hundreds.gammaray - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Why do Intel and AMD even started building IGPs in the first place?Why can't they just put a video card in every desktop and laptop?
And if they continue making IGPs, whats their goal?
Do they eventually wanna get rid of video card makers?
versesuvius - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Better yet, why not just put the graphics on a chip like the CPU? That way the "upgrade path" is a lot clearer, not to mention "possible". It will also offer the possibility of having those chips in different flavors, for example good video transcoder or good gamer. There is room for that on the motherboard now that the north bridge is gone. Or they can review the IBM boards from 286 days and learn from their clean, and very efficient design.Unfortunately the financial model of the IT industry from a collective viewpoint entails throwing a lot of good hardware away just for a small advantage. Just the way many will throw away their HD3000 IGPs without having ever used it. The comparison is cruel but that should not be what distinguishes them from the toilet paper industry.
As of late, Anand has taken to reminding us that technology has taken leaps ahead of our wishes and that we need time to absorb it. That is not the case. No wish is ever materialized. We only have to take whatever is offered and marvel at the only parameter that can be measured: speed. Less energy consumption is fine, but I suppose that comes with the territory (i.e. can Intel or AMD produce 22 nm chips that consume the same watts as 65 nm chips with the same number of transistors?).
tipoo - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Cost, size, power draw. All reduced by putting everything on one chip. I'm not sure if AMD wants to get rid of discreet graphics cards considering that's their one profitable division, but Intel sure does :)klmccaughey - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
I've tried every setup possible and have never got quicksync to work at all. It won't even work with discrete graphics enabled and my monitor hooked up to the intel chip on my Z68 board.I have tried mediacoder (error 14), media converter 7, MEdia Espresso. I have downloaded the media SDK, I have tried the new FFmthingy from the intel engineer. Nothing, nada. It has never ever worked. AMD media converter will convert a few limited formats that went out of fashion 5 years ago (of all my 1.5TB of video the only thing it would touch was old episodes of Becker).
All in all I have got nothing whatsoever from any video accelerated encoding and I have always had to go back to my tried and trusted handbrake.
I don't think it actually works - I've never heard of anyone getting it working and the forums on mediacoder are full of people who have given up.
klmccaughey - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
*disabled (for discrete graphics)JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
What input format are you using? I've only tried it on laptops, and I've done MOV input from my Nikon D3100 camera with no issues whatsoever. I've also done a WMV input file (the sample Wildlife.WMV file from Windows 7) and it didn't have any trouble. If you're trying to do a larger video, that might be an issue, or it might just be a problem with the codec used on the original video.dealcorn - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Intel has big eyes for the workstation graphics market and has had some success at the bottom of this market. Will IB's IGD advances enhance Intel's access to this market?chizow - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Hope you're not counting yourself, you've proven long ago your opinion isn't worth paying attention to.