The Intel Ivy Bridge (Core i7 3770K) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Ryan Smith on April 23, 2012 12:03 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it was the first AAA DX10+ game. Consequently it makes no attempt to shy away from pushing the graphics envelope, and pushing GPUs to their limits at the same time. Even at low settings Battlefield 3 is a handful, and to be able to run it on an iGPU would no doubt make quite a few traveling gamers happy.
So does Ivy Bridge reach its goal here? Kind of. 37.3 is playable in single player, but it's been in our experience that multiplayer framerates can bottom out at half our SP benchmark, which means Ivy Bridge would be bottoming out in the high teens.
All things considered however, this is another case of Intel greatly improving their performance. Compared to Sandy Bridge, Ivy bridge is 48% faster, once again well ahead of the clockspeed and EU count improvements for HD 4000. Intel's improved shader performance plays a large part here, but BF3 provides a good mix of shading, texturing, and geometry stress at low settings, meaning Ivy Bridge is getting a full workout. As a result it's also once again closing the gap on Llano, trailing AMD's iGPU by only 25% here.
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wingless - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I'll keep my 2600K.....just kidding
formulav8 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I hope you give AMD even more praise when Trinity is released Anand. IMO you way overblew how great Intels igp stuff. Its their 4th gen that can't even beat AMDs first gen.Just my opinion :p
Zstream - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
I agree..dananski - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
As much as I like the idea of decent Skyrim framerates on every laptop, and even though I find the HD4000 graphics an interesting read, I couldn't care less about it in my desktop. Gamers will not put up with integrated graphics - even this good - unless they're on a tight budget, in which case they'll just get Llano anyway, or wait for Trinity. As for IVB, why can't we have a Pentium III sized option without IGP, or get 6 cores and no IGP?Kjella - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Strategy, they're using their lead in CPUs to bundle it with a GPU whether you want it or not. When you take your gamer card out of your gamer machine it'll still have an Intel IGP for all your other uses (or for your family or the second-hand market or whatever), that's one sale they "stole" from AMD/nVidia's low end. Having a separate graphics card is becoming a niche market for gamers. That's better for Intel than lowering the expectation that a "premium" CPU costs $300, if you bring the price down it's always much harder to raise it again...Samus - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
As amazing this CPU is, and how much I'd love it (considering I play BF3 and need a GTX560+ anyway) I have to agree the GPU improvement is pretty disappointing...After all that work, Intel still can't even come close to AMD's integrated graphics. It's 75% of AMD's performance at best.
Cogman - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
There is actually a good reason for both AMD and Intel to keep a GPU on their CPUs no matter what. That reason is OpenCV. This move makes the assumption that OpenCV or programming languages like it will eventually become mainstream. With a GPU coupled to every CPU, it saves developers from writing two sets of code to deal with different platforms.froggr - Saturday, May 12, 2012 - link
OpenCV is Open Computer Vision and runs either way. I think you're talking about OpenCL (Open Compute Language). and even that runs fine without a GPU. OpenCL can use all cores CPU + GPU and does not require separate code bases.OpenCL runs faster with a GPU because it's better parallellized.
frozentundra123456 - Monday, April 23, 2012 - link
Maybe we could actually see some hard numbers before heaping so much praise on Trinity??I will be convinced about the claims of 50% IGP improvements when I see them, and also they need to make a lot of improvements to Bulldozer, especially in power consumption, before it is a competitive CPU. I hope it turns out to be all the AMD fans are claiming, but we will see.
SpyCrab - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Sure, Llano gives good gaming performance. But it's pretty much at Athlon II X4 CPU performance.