Intel Iris Pro 5200 Graphics Review: Core i7-4950HQ Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2013 10:01 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
A Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
At 1366 x 768 with medium quality settings, there doesn't appear to be much of a memory bandwidth limitation here at all. Vsync was disabled but there's a definite clustering of performance close to 60 fps. The gap between the 650M and Iris Pro is just under 7%. Compared to the 77W HD 4000 Iris Pro is good for almost a 60% increase in performance. The same goes for the mobile Trinity comparison.
At higher resolution/higher quality settings, there's a much larger gap between the 650M and Iris Pro 5200. At high quality defaults both FXAA and SSAA are enabled, which given Iris Pro's inferior texture sampling and pixel throughput results in a much larger victory for the 650M. NVIDIA maintains a 30 - 50% performance advantage here. The move from a 47W TDP to 55W gives Iris Pro an 8% performance uplift. If we look at the GT 640's performance relative to the 5200, it's clear that memory bandwidth alone isn't responsible for the performance delta here (although it does play a role).
Once more, compared to all other integrated solutions Iris Pro has no equal. At roughly 2x the performance of a 77W HD 4000, 20% better than a desktop Trinity and 40% better than mobile Trinity, Iris Pro looks very good.
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kyuu - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
It's probably habit coming from eluding censoring.maba - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
To be fair, there is only one data point (GFXBenchmark 2.7 T-Rex HD - 4X MSAA) where the 47W cTDP configuration is more than 40% slower than the tested GT 650M (rMBP15 90W).Actually we have the following [min, max, avg, median] for 47W (55W):
games: 61%, 106%, 78%, 75% (62%, 112%, 82%, 76%)
synth.: 55%, 122%, 95%, 94% (59%, 131%, 102%, 100%)
compute: 85%, 514%, 205%, 153% (86%, 522%, 210%, 159%)
overall: 55%, 514%, 101%, 85% (59%, 522%, 106%, 92%)
So typically around 75% for games with a considerably lower TDP - not that bad.
I do not know whether Intel claimed equal or better performance given a specific TDP or not. With the given 47W (55W) compared to a 650M it would indeed be a false claim.
But my point is, that with at least ~60% performance and typically ~75% it is admittedly much closer than you stated.
whyso - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Note your average 650m is clocked lower than the 650m reviewed here.lmcd - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
If I recall correctly, the rMBP 650m was clocked as high as or slightly higher than the 660m (which was really confusing at the time).JarredWalton - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Correct. GT 650M by default is usually 835MHz + Boost, with 4GHz RAM. The GTX 660M is 875MHz + Boost with 4GHz RAM. So the rMBP15 is a best-case for GT 650M. However, it's not usually a ton faster than the regular GT 650M -- benchmarks for the UX51VZ are available here:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/814
tipoo - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
I think any extra power just went to the rMBP scaling operations.DickGumshoe - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Do you know if the scaling algorithms are handled by the CPU or the GPU on the rMBP?The big thing I am wondering is that if Apple releases a higher-end model with the MQ CPU's, would the HD 4600 be enough to eliminate the UI lag currently present on the rMBP's HD 4000?
If it's done on the GPU, then having the HQ CPU's might actually get *better* UI performance than the MQ CPU's for the rMPB.
lmcd - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
No, because these benchmarks would change the default resolution, which as I understand is something the panel would compensate for?Wait, aren't these typically done while the laptop screen is off and an external display is used?
whyso - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
You got this wrong. 650m is 735/1000 + boost to 850/1000. 660m is 835/1250 boost to 950/1250.jasonelmore - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
worst mistake intel made was that demo with DIRT when it was side by side with a 650m laptop. That set people's expectations. and it falls short in the reviews and people are dogging it. If they would have just kept quite people would be praising them up and down right now.