Intel Iris Pro 5200 Graphics Review: Core i7-4950HQ Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2013 10:01 AM ESTMetro: Last Light
Metro: Last Light is the latest entry in the Metro series of post-apocalyptic shooters by developer 4A Games. Like its processor, Last Light is a game that sets a high bar for visual quality, and at its highest settings an equally high bar for system requirements thanks to its advanced lighting system. This doesn’t preclude it from running on iGPUs thanks to the fact that it scales down rather well, but it does mean that we have to run at fairly low resolutions to get a playable framerate.
Metro is a pretty heavy game to begin with, but Iris Pro starts off with an extremely good showing here. In its 55W configuration, Iris Pro is only 5% slower than the GeForce GT 650M. At 47W the gap is larger at 11% however. At 1366 x 768 the difference seems less memory bandwidth related and has more to do with efficiency of the graphics hardware itself.
The comparison to mobile Trinity is a walk in the park for Iris Pro. Even a 100W desktop Trinity part is appreciably slower here.
Increasing the resolution and quality settings changes things quite a bit. The 650M pulls ahead, and now the Iris Pro 5200 basically equals the performance of the GT 640. Intel claims a very high hit rate on the L4 cache, however it could be that 50GB/s is just not enough bandwidth between the GPU and Crystalwell. The performance improvement compared to all other processor graphics solutions, regardless of TDP, is still well in favor of Iris Pro. The i7-4950HQ holds a 50% advantage over the desktop i7-4770K and is almost 2x the speed of the i7-3770K.
Comparing mobile to mobile, Iris Pro delivers over 2x the frame rate of Trinity.
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arjunp2085 - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
I was under the impression that Richland has been selling on newegg as per a comment on an earlier article..I was also wondering since you had done a review on Richland from MSI notebook review i was wondering if you would do a similar comparison..
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6949/msi-gx70-3be-ri...
It would be appreciated just placing all the possible matches on the table and a paragraph with selection criteria for the review making the choices dispelling opinion of missing any models
GameHopper - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Why no real power measurements? If it's so important to iris Pro, real world power numbers will be more useful than just listing TDP of the partsshinkueagle - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
The GIANT has awoken! Performance-wise, its amazing! Destroys Trinity! Price-wise.... Well, the area needs some work...trip1ex - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Yes really disappointed there is no socketed cpu solution that have the best igpu config.But I suppose I already have Ivy Bridge i5 for my WMC pc and it is good enough. Still be a nice cheap way to build a secondary small desktop that could also do some light gaming.
Lataa - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
dikicha23@gmail.comvFunct - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Curious why Intel just doesn't go straight for the jugular and release a discrete GPU part on their 22nm process. NVidia/AMD is stuck at 28mm because of their foundries, and it appears Intel's GPU architecture is feature complete and therefore competitive with the discrete parts if they scaled up everything by 4x or 5x.NVidia & AMD should be worried about their core high-profit-margins business!
jamescox - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
The photo you have on page 4 showing the 2 separate die is strange. The haswell die should not be square. Other photos I have seen show the expected (extremely rectangular) haswell die and a tiny ram chip. I would expect a haswell based chip with double the cpu (8 real cores), and no gpu eventually; this would be almost square. Do you know why your chip does not match other multi-chip module photos online?jamescox - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I guess the other photos are haswell plus an integrated chipset in the same module. The photo of the two die is still strange, as neither of these look like a haswell die.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
That's because that's the picture for GT3e Iris Pro 5200 graphics. The bigger square die is the Haswell CPU+GT3 GPU, while the smaller one is the on-package DRAM.The dual core with on-package chipset is even longer than the regular Haswell.
tipoo - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
Yes it should, you're thinking of the ultrabook chips with a controller to the side, not eDRAM. Those ones are rectangular. Look at a haswell MBP 15" teardown to verify.