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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jasonelmore - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Looking at the prices, this will raise the price or Lower the margins of the 13" Retina Macbook Pro by about $150 each.mschira - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Yea laptops benefit most - good for them.But what about the workstation?
So intel stopped being a CPU company and turned into a mediocre GPU company? (can even beat last years GT650M)
I would applaude the rise in GPU performance if they had not completely forgotten the CPU.
M.
n13L5 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
You're exactly right.13" ultrabook buyers who need it the most get little to nothing out of this.
And desktop users don't need or want GT3e and it uses system RAM. Better off buying a graphics card instead of upgrading to Haswell on desktops.
glugglug - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
While I agree this misses "where it would benefit most", I disagree on just *where* that is.I guess Intel agrees with Microsofts implicit decision that media center is dead. Real-time HQ quicksync would be perfect to transcode anything extenders couldn't handle, and would also make the scanning for and skipping of commercials incredibly efficient.
n13L5 - Tuesday, June 11, 2013 - link
Core i5…4350U…Iris 5000…15W…1.5 GHzCore i7…4550U…Iris 5000…15W…1.5 GHz
Core i7…4650U…Iris 5000…15W…1.7 GHz
These should work. The 4650U is available in the Sony Duo 13 as we speak, though at a hefty price tag of $1,969
Eric S - Monday, July 1, 2013 - link
The last 13" looks like they were prepping it for a fusion drive then changed their mind leaving extra space in the enclosure. I think it is due for an internal redesign that could allow for a higher wattage processor.I think the big deal is the OpenCL performance paired with ECC memory for the GPU. The Nvidia discrete processor uses non-ECC GDDR. This will be a big deal for users of Adobe products. Among other things, this solves the issue of using the Adobe mercury engine with non-ECC memory and the resulting single byte errors in the output. The errors are not a big deal for games, but may not be ideal for rendering professional output and scientific applications. This is basically a mobile AMD FireGL or Nvidia Quadro card. Now we just need OpenCL support for the currently CUDA-based mercury engines in After Effects and Premiere. I have a feeling that is coming or Adobe will also lose Mercury Engine compatibility with the new Mac Pro.
tviceman - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Impressive iGPU performance, but I knew Intel was absolutely full of sh!t when claiming equal to or better than GT 650m performance. Not really even close, typically behind by 30-50% across the board.Krysto - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
When isn't Intel full of shit? Always take what the improvements they claim and cut it in half, and you'll be a lot closer to reality.xtc-604 - Saturday, June 8, 2013 - link
Lol...you think that's bad? Look at Apple's claims. "over 200 new improvements in Mountain Lion"piroroadkill - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
sh<exclamation point>t? What are we? 9?