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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beginner99 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Impressive...if you ignore the pricing.tipoo - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
?velatra - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
On page 4 of the article there 's a word "presantive" which should probably be "representative."jabber - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
May I ask why The Sims is never featured in your reviews on such GPU setups?Why? Well in my line of business, fixing and servicing lots of laptops with the integrated chips the one game group that crops up over and over again is The Sims!
Never had a laptop in from the real world that had any of the games you benchmarked here. But lots of them get The Sims played on them.
JDG1980 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Agreed. The benchmark list is curiously disconnected from what these kind of systems are actually used to do in the real world. Seldom does anyone use a laptop of any kind to play "Triple-A" hardcore games. Usually it's stuff like The Sims and WoW. I think those should be included as benchmarks for integrated graphics, laptop chipsets, and low-end HTPC-focused graphics cards.tipoo - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Because the Sims is much easier to run than most of these. Just because people tried running it on GMA graphics and wondered why it didn't work doesn't mean it's a demanding workload.jabber - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Yes but the point is the games tested are pretty much pointless. How many here would bother to play them on such equipped laptops?Pretty much none.
But plenty 'normal' folks who would buy such equipment will play plenty of lesser games. In my job looking after 'normal' folks thats quite important when parents ask me about buying a laptop for their kid that wants to play a few games on it.
The world and sites such as Anandtech shouldnt just revolve around the whims of 'gamer dudes' especially as it appears the IT world is generally moving away from gamers.
It's a general computing world in future, rather than a enthusiast computing world like it was 10 years ago. I think some folks need to re-align their expectations going forward.
tipoo - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
I mean, if it can run something like Infinite or even Crysis 3 fairly well, you can assume it would run the Sims well.Quizzical - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
It would help immensely if you would say what you were comparing it to. As you are surely aware, a system that includes an A10-5800K but cripples it by leaving a memory channel vacant and running the other at 1333 MHz won't perform at all similarly to a properly built system with the same A10-5800K with two 4 GB modules of 1866 MHz DDR3 in properly matched channels.That should be an easy fix by adding a few sentences to page 5, but without it, the numbers don't mean much, as you're basically considering Intel graphics in isolation without a meaningful AMD comparison.
Quizzical - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Ah, it looks like the memory clock speeds have been added. Thanks for that.