14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen the latest news on the Cedar Trail processing platform and, now, we get to see some early benchmarking results for the much more hyped up Ivy Bridge CPU line.
As has been said repeatedly before, the Ivy Bridge series will have better graphics than the Sandy Bridge CPUs.
Just how much better was hard to say, regardless of what clock speeds and other numbers managed to leak to the net.
Now, however, we have some actual benchmarks to feast our eyes upon, courtesy of Expreview.
Having managed to get a hold of an engineering sample of the unlocked Core i5-3570K, they pitted it against the Core i5-2500K.
The former has the HD 4000 graphics, while the latter uses the existing HD 3000. Needless to say, the results were far apart.
In 3DMarck Vantage synthetic benchmarks, the boost in performance was of up to 88.9% in the Entry preset and 122.1% in the Performance preset.
As if that alone wasn't enough, the team ran some games to see how the chips compared, coming out with an improvement of 30% to 84%, depending on title.
Starcarft II was the one exhibiting the least difference, but even then, the 30.2% is a considerable jump. Meanwhile, Farcry 2 displayed the largest increase, followed by Left 4 Dead 2, with a 71.6% boost. After that came DiRT 3, with 51.8%, and Street Fighter IV (43%).
The games ran at a screen resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. Given that the average benefit was 56.2%, the HD 4000 is at least 50% better than HD 3000.
Now we just have to wait until April for the Ivy Bridge processors to officially debut. There were some rumors that the line would be delayed until June, but we were later told this was not the case. Further exploration of the matter mentioned that only some dual-core versions had been pushed back.