The Intel Broadwell Desktop Review: Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C Tested (Part 1)
by Ian Cutress on June 2, 2015 7:45 AM ESTGaming Benchmarks: Mid-Range
Shifting gears, let's take the iGPU out of the equation and look at gaming from a CPU perspective, By moving up to higher-end video cards, we can being to see how Broadwell stacks up in CPU-bound gaming scenarios.
Alien: Isolation
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with Ultra settings, whereas for mid and high range graphics we bump this up to 1080p, taking the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
Total War: Attila
The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
GRID: Autosport
No graphics tests are complete without some input from Codemasters and the EGO engine, which means for this round of testing we point towards GRID: Autosport, the next iteration in the GRID and racing genre. As with our previous racing testing, each update to the engine aims to add in effects, reflections, detail and realism, with Codemasters making ‘authenticity’ a main focal point for this version.
GRID’s benchmark mode is very flexible, and as a result we created a test race using a shortened version of the Red Bull Ring with twelve cars doing two laps. The car is focus starts last and is quite fast, but usually finishes second or third. For low end graphics we test at 1080p medium settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get the full 1080p maximum. Both the average and minimum frame rates are recorded.
Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor
The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadows of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark. For low end graphics we examine at 720p with low settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get 1080p Ultra. The top graphics test is also redone at 3840x2160, also with Ultra settings, and we also test two cards at 4K where possible.
Shadows of Mordor at 4K, Single GPU
Conclusions on Mid-Range Graphics
With the Intel iGPU removed from the picture, what we're seeing here is the combination of Broadwell's architecture improvements, and the Crystal Well eDRAM functioning as an L4 cache for the CPU cores. The biggest benefit here Broadwell-DT was with the R9 285 for GRID on minimum frame rates, showing 75.6 for the 4790K vs 80.06 for the 5775C. Otherwise performance overall is not all that different from what we already see with the best Haswell CPUs, however it's a bit surprising that the Broadwell CPUs don't fall behind, given their rather sizable frequency deficit versus the i7-4790K.
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Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Wow so anyone who buys one of these chips is spending half their money on a useless GPU that cant even beat a lowly R7 250. That is $120 to $180 totally wasted on GPU, which occupies half the die. Talk about a massive intel tax. What happens if intel only offer a K version that contains half the die wasted by this useless GPU? How many people are going to just suck it up and buy it even though half the chip will never be used because they will be running a real graphics card?TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
These chips really only make sense for high end laptops like the 2015 MacBook Pro - which ironically doesn't use them. It boggles my mind that Intel is shipping so many transistors that go completely unused. It's the antithesis of Moore's Law - Intel silicon is HALF-USELESS.PubFiction - Wednesday, July 1, 2015 - link
That's because intel only cares about mobile now, this stuff isn't made for us its hacked to work for desktop users this stuff is all about mobile. Personally I deal with largely because I am just happy that people who buy stuff like macbooks can now actually have a chance of running boot camp and playing games. In the mobile work igpus have always been a big part of the scene. Also the better intel does with integrated graphics the more they are able to kill AMD/NVidia which is what they really want to do, slowly and steadily eat the bottom end of the GPU market out from under them. It used to be that ANY discreet graphics on a laptop was WAYYYYY better than integrated. But after intels 2nd gen core series the bottom X1XX and X2XX gpus seemed to not make any sense, and intel has been getting better to the point now that X4XXX gpus are starting to not make sense. This screws graphics makers into only being able to sell higher end X5XX + GPUs and they destroys their bread and butter money.bill.rookard - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
As much as I hate to say it, I agree. While their new iGPU is beating AMDs iGPU, the place where such iGPUs make sense is in small HTPC scenarios most of all (apart from budget gaming laptops which have a completely different thermal restriction). The kicker is though that the pricing is far too high for even being considered for what amounts to a media playback machine. It's thermally too hot for a laptop scenario.If they had paired up the iGPU with a G3258 CPU core set and the Crystalwell DRAM, and priced it near AMD's offerings, THAT would be a very compelling product.
Refuge - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I'd buy that.extide - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Uhhh, maybe you need your eyes checked, but it is beating the R7 240 in all except one of the benchmarks...MikhailT - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Dude, go re-read the graphs, Intel is beating R7 in almost all benchmarks.Namisecond - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Actually, the GPU takes up over 60% of the die space on the first chips, there is a 2nd piece of silicon comprising the EDRAM that take up a not-so-insignificant piece of real estate on the chip.The situation with AMD APUs are similar, about 40-45% of their die space is GPU. When they go HBM, they will in a similar situation to Intel, and they'll need to charge much higher price to make up for the tech.
If you want lowest cost/value for CPU, get a Pentium, particularly the anniversary edition. They're cheap (I can get them for about $50) You can overclock the shit out of them and their IGPU only takes up about 40% of their die space. If you need more CPU power in the Socket 1150 format, get a Xeon E3 which has no IGPU...they are cheaper than Core I7, but they cost more than core I5.
der - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Awesome stuff! Killer chipset!der - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
50th comment!