The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 6, 2012 8:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Ivy Bridge
Anisotropic Filtering Quality
At IDF last year Intel promised an improvement in its anisotropic filtering quality compared to Sandy Bridge. Personally I didn't believe SNB's GPU was fast enough to warrant turning on AF in most modern titles, but as Intel's GPU performance improves it must take image quality more seriously.
I wouldn't put a ton of faith in these early results as things can change, but AF quality does appear to be much better than Sandy Bridge:
The peculiar radial lines that were present in SNB's algorithm remain here, although they are more muted. Again it's too early to tell if we're looking at final image quality or something that will improve over time. If we are to judge based on this result alone, I'd say it mirrors what we saw in our performance investigation: Ivy is a step towards AMD in the GPU department, but not a step ahead.
DirectX 11 Compute Performance
As Ivy Bridge is Intel's first DirectX 11 GPU architecture, we're actually able to run some DX11 workloads on it without having them fall back to DX10. We'll do a much more significant investigation into GPU compute performance in our full Ivy Bridge review, but as a teaser we've got our standard DirectX 11 Compute Shader Fluid Simulation test from the DX11 SDK:
Ivy Bridge does extremely well here, likely due in no small part to its excellent last level cache. The Fluid Simulation we run looks at shared memory performance, which allows Ivy to do quite well. We're seeing over 3.2x the performance of Sandy Bridge here, and even a slight advantage over Llano.
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sabot00 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
How long will Intel keep its HD Graphics increases?MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I don't understand the logic of selling a high end CPU with the best IGP. Seems like anyone running an it isn't going to stick with the IGP for games, and if they aren't gaming, then what good is that high-end GPU? Maybe the entire "Core i" line should use the HD 4000.Flunk - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Because the low end chips are just die-harvested high end chips it makes sense. No reason to disable it so they leave it on.And some people do actually use high end processors with IGPs. It's fairly easy to get one from a major OEM. It's stupid but most people don't know any better.
aahkam - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link
Funny comments I saw.What's wrong even if the High End CPU that comes with IGP?
Is High End CPU = Gaming Machine CPU? If that is your logic, you're a rich but shallow boy!
I do lots of Video Editing and Transcoding, I need High End CPU but None of the High End GPU beats Quick Sync in Transcoding in terms of Quality and Speed.
dqniel - Friday, April 6, 2012 - link
"and if they aren't gaming, then what good is that high-end GPU?"I feel like you missed that part. He's not saying that only gamers use high-end CPUs. He's saying that gamers using a high-end CPU won't care about the high-end iGPU because they won't use it. Also, non-gamers who need a high-end CPU generally won't see the benefits of the included high-end iGPU. So, he proposes that the better niche for the high-end iGPU would be on the more affordable CPUs, because then budget-minded gamers could buy an affordable CPU that has a relatively powerful iGPU integrated into it.
defter - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
This is a mid-range CPU, not high-end one.High desktop CPUs (i7 3800-3900) don't have IGP.
KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
It is because laptops continue to get slimmer and slimmer. Getting good GPU performance without the compromises on the chassis that a dedicated GPU would force is the point.Tormeh - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
This.My next laptop will have processor graphics for the sake of battery life and size, and whoever has the best graphics gets my money.
bznotins - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Seconded.aguilpa1 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
If the 4000HD is on the level of lets say a 560m I would not hesitate to get a laptop with no dedicated graphics but if it isn't I'm still going to go for the dedicated.