Onboard GPU Performance

I couldn’t forget about the onboard GPU when doing my testing even though Intel didn’t change anything on the GPU side of things. I pulled out the GTX 780 and hooked up directly to the connections on our motherboard to run through our onboard benchmark suite. Getting the onboard to work, it took me a little time to figure out that our 2560x1440 monitor wasn’t supported via DVI. Once I figured that out testing went smoothly.

To start things off I ran through Cinebench again but this time using the OpenGL benchmark to test the GPU encoding. As you can see, the increase in CPU clock speed played an important part in bumping the performance results up over the AMD A10-7850k ever so slightly. This was over 5FPS faster than the 4770k but still less than the 7850k when running in crossfire with a dedicated GPU (as expected).

Surprisingly in 3DMark I actually saw a drop in overall performance compared to the 4770k. I ran through this test multiple times to confirm the results. We will have to see if the in game results show similar results here farther down the page.

In Heaven Benchmark 2.0 the FPS results were still painfully slow at the extreme setting but the additional CPU clock speed increased performance by .1 of an FPS. This is still nowhere near enough to catch up to the onboard performance on AMDs latest APU though.

When I originally tested the Haswell i7-4770k the onboard performance was what I would consider “good enough” in a lot of games as long as your expectations aren’t too high. Age hasn’t really been good to the Haswell architecture when it comes to onboard performance. AMDs APUs out-performed by large margins in each of the in game tests. The silver lining though is that in each game the additional CPU clock speed did speed things up slightly.