It is no secret that Intel pretty much owns the desktop market. This is not only in terms of performance per watt but in most cases performance Vs. Cost. Their chief rival AMD has had setback after setback which has hobbled their ability to compete. In fact is has gotten so bad that AMD has officially stated that they will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the desktop market (they will continue to make desktop CPUs but are moving more toward mobile CPUs). This is a shame and normally could mean that new products from Intel will slow down along with innovation (nothing makes you invent like real competition). However this has not stopped Intel from pushing out a new line up of Desktop CPUs that fall under the title of Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is the Tick part of Intel’s Tick-Tock strategy where Sandy Bridge was the introduction of the microarchitecture and Ivy Bridge is the official die shrink from 32nm to 22nm. So let’s see what Ivy Bridge brings to the table in the form of the 3rd Generation Core i7 3770k.
Performance Part III; Gaming - Gaming is a very real-world test. We do not use benchmarking scripts but actually play the games though a pre-planned level and record the frame rates using FRAPS. This allows up to see exactly how the CPU benefits (or hinders) performance. We have moved to a new format and will now be bringing you a game of each of the three common Direct X Levels. This should give a broader idea of CPU performance across multiple gaming APIs. Modern Warfare 2 DX9 - Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is a fast paced first person shooter style game. It covers the gamut of modern ‘low intensity’ and covert style combat that is actually going on in today’s world. Yes the plot line is farfetched but some of the actual types of missions are not far from the mark. As it is a console port it is limited to DX9 for its engine. However due to the massive ‘bar fight’ AI it can be a good test for a CPU. Settings are shown below.
If you were hoping to see the GMA 4000 do miracles when it comes to gaming we are going to have to disappoint you here. As a standalone GPU the GMA 4000 does not do that great at 1920x1080. Our frame rates topped out at around 20 FPS during our testing. Of course once we had a discrete GPU in the system things were very different.
Modern Warfare 3 DX9 - Modern Warfare 3 is the next (and possibly last) chapter in the Modern Warfare franchise. In this episode of the game you take on some familiar roles as well as a few new ones. The style of play is the same, even if the environment is a little different. Our testing run takes you from through the entire first level called Black Tuesday. Settings and frame rates are shown below.
Oddly enough the GMA4000 seems to do much better than we saw with Modern Warfare 2. Even with everything turned up to high we still had playable frame rates with the average topping out around 36FPS! This was unexpected although we have to say we were very happy to see this level of performance with the same settings we used for the discrete GPU testing. Alan Wake DX10 - Alan Wake is a psychological thriller/puzzle game where you take on the role of an author who somehow finds the creations of his books coming to life. We ran our test starting at the opening scene and ran until we reached the lighthouse. This takes you through the tutorial but also lets you run through some real game play. Settings and performance results are shown below.
Under the pressure of the DX 10 engine in Alan Wake the GMA 4000 is not able to produce a playable result at full resolution. Even when we lowered the settings and resolution to 1280x1024 we still could not get above 18 FPS average. There were no issues playing with a discrete GPU in the system. Gaming recap - As we have said before the GMA 4000 like the IGP in Sandy Bridge was not intended to play high-end games. It was meant to provide an HD experience for media consumption (including 3D HD Video). Yes it will be able to do some gaming and it can even get a performance boost from the VirtuMVP software that will be bundled with almost every Z77 motherboard, but it was still not designed to push out screaming frame rates of today’s high-end games. This is very evident in the performance that we are seeing here.
