AMD Versus Intel Integrated Graphics w/ Ivy Bridge

Crysis

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off of the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago.

The full retail version of the game Crysis was used with patch 1.21 for benchmarking. FRAPS was used over the internal benchmark utility to help avoid driver enhancements.

Results: When Crysis came out in 2007, the game was so demanding that the catchphrase “Yeah, but can it run Crysis?” caught on among gamers. As you can see with low image quality settings the game was able to run on all ten platforms, but not very well. As you can see Intel has really improved their integrated graphics and for the most part we would say that they are performing on the same level as what AMD is offering. The one thing that is clear in the performance charts is that as the screen resolution increases, the performance of the Intel graphics drops at a larger rate than AMD graphics. The AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ processor with AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics on the A75 chipset motherboard was 17.5% faster than the Intel Core i5-3550 ‘Ivy Bridge’ processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and the Intel H77 chipset motherboard at a resolution of 1680×1050. If you go to down to a resolution of just 1024×768 you’ll see that Intel actually leads by less than 1%.

Results: We tried to push the envelope a little and ran 1024×768 with medium image quality and found that both AMD and Intel processors with integrated graphics are able to play Crysis with these settings at an acceptable frame rate. Back in 2007 when this game first came out it was unthinkable to play Crysis at any resolution on medium IQ settings on integrated graphics. Back then many discrete graphics cards of that time period were having a hard time performing at these levels. Integrated graphics have become much more powerful lately. Intel has had an impressive 14x improvement in graphics performance since the Intel G965 chipset was released back in 2006. The Intel Ivy Bridge processor with Intel HD 4000 Graphics performed 77% better on this test than the Intel Sandy Bridge processor with Intel HD 3000 Graphics! Intel said graphics performance was 2x better with Intel HD 4000 Graphics and we are pretty darn close to that number!