Onboard GPU Performance

As with Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge made even more improvements on Intel’s on processor GPU as we spoke about earlier. The new Intel HD 4000 GPU is similar to the Intel HD 3000 but with noticeable improvements, much more than what was improved on the CPU side of things. Because of that I was excited to put it to the test. I went back through and retested the Intel HD 3000 in our i5-2500k on the Intel Z77 motherboard as well as testing the i7-3770. Here are the results.

Although it’s a synthetic benchmark, 3Dmark does a great job of comparing different GPU’s. In this case we had to stick with the older 3DMark Vantage due to the lack of directX 11 support with the HD 3000 GPU. As you can see this is much more than a small improvement. We are seeing double the performance out of the new on board GPU. It will be interesting to see how it performs in game.

In cinebench using the Open GL results we didn’t see the same results as we did with 3DMark Vantage, but there is still a noticeable increase in performance.

Running through the Heaven Benchmark 3.0 with all of the settings turned up including Anti-Aliasing on an onboard GPU can be frustrating at best. But it is still a good representation of how the onboard GPU’s compare to dedicated GPUs. As you can see the performance increase between the 3000 and 4000 is amazing, but we are still words apart from what you would want from a high end dedicated GPU. But running through at 10 FPS is worlds better than the 5.1 that we saw with the older Intel HD 3000.

Below are all of our in game results. With the exception of dirt 3, all of the other games we tested with the two onboard GPUs show a 20 to 50 percent increase in FPS. Most of our benchmarks are running with the settings cranked up to the maximum settings, it’s obvious that you wouldn’t want to do this. But you will be able to get most of these games up to play with good frame rates simple by putting them on medium settings and avoiding the Anti-Aliasing.