At the same time, though, laptop users with Intel graphics may be able to look forward to reasonable performance in today’s games, if they’re willing to sacrifice a little eye candy. Serious gamers will want midrange or high-end graphics cards for the smoothest frame rates at high detail settings. However, the Intel HD 3000 built into Sandy Bridge suggested that these low-end cards may have limited utility, and the HD 4000 component of Ivy Bridge pretty much puts the nail in the coffin. We’ll have to withhold any final conclusion until we find a few more applications to test.ĪMD and Nvidia created a healthy business out of selling $40-to-$70 graphics cards, offering improved performance and compatibility with modern games. Or perhaps applications need to be tweaked a little to make full use of the Ivy Bridge video engine. This may be a case where simple clock frequency may have given the older GPU an advantage. Let’s take a look at actual benchmarks.īoth results were repeatable, but the minor differences really signal a dead heat, with a slight edge going to the older Sandy Bridge GPU. Those feature additions, along with the internal rearchitecting of the actual compute units, suggest that Ivy Bridge 3D graphics performance should be better than what you can get from other products. Quick Sync video is improved, and includes better support for Blu-ray stereoscopic 3D.HDMI 1.4a, including high-bit-rate audio, is supported.Support is included for up to three simultaneous displays (DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort).A shared 元 cache is built into the GPU core itself, which reduces the need to fetch data from the ring bus and the CPU cache.The new compute shader enables greater data parallelism, and full support for Shader Model 5, which is required for DirectX 11.Two texture units are present, as opposed to a single texture unit in Sandy Bridge.Full support for Microsoft’s DirectX 11 API, including hardware tessellation and GPU compute: Intel claims that GPU-compute applications will run exclusively on the Ivy Bridge GPU if so instructed, and GPU-compute tasks won’t be offloaded to the CPU.Before diving into performance comparisons, it’s worthwhile to examine additional Ivy Bridge GPU feature changes.

Intel hd 4000 graphics card