Diablo III Gaming Benchmarks on Ivy Bridge & Trinity Laptops

Diablo III Laptop Benchmarking

The highly-anticipated release of Diablo III has finally happened and we wanted to see how this game performs on some of the new laptops that have just come out from both Intel and AMD. Last month, Intel released the companies 3rd Generation Core Processors (Ivy Bridge) that also included a huge boost in gaming performance thanks to the included Intel HD Graphics 4000 processor that has 16 execution units. Intel has created a ton of buzz about how good their new graphics processor is, but are they better than what AMD has to offer? Intel might have been able to say that they have managed to catch up to AMD, but that all changed yesterday when AMD unveiled their 2nd generation APU (Trinity) that has AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics inside. It looks like the notebooks with integrated graphics are now able to produce discrete class graphics, but are they enough for new game titles like Diablo III?

We have all waited over 10 years for this game to come out, so you want
to make sure that you are running it on the best platform possible
right? Do these new laptops with integrated graphics have what it takes to run Diablo III? That is the goal of this article and what we plan on finding out!

To benchmark Diablo III we will be using two notebooks. On the Intel side we have the ASUS N56V notebook with the Intel Core i7-3920XM Ivy Bridge Processor and Intel HD Graphics 4000. For AMD we will be using the Trinity reference design notebook with the AMD A10-4600M Trinity APU and AMD Radeon HD 7660G graphics. Both notebooks were running the latest drivers available.

If you tried to play Diablo III on the day the game was released (May 15th, 2012) you likely ran into Blizzard game server issues. We wanted to post this article on launch day, but had major issues getting connected to a server yesterday afternoon due to emergency repairs that Blizzard was doing. Even after the repairs were completed we would get error 3007, which means the servers are busy. On May 16th, 2012 the game servers were finally letting us login properly and we were able to finish up some game testing and performance benchmarking!

Diablo III has five different classes like Diablo II. All five classes can be played as male or female characters. Here are the five classes and some details about each one.

• Barbarian – brute force makes a successful return, the Barbarian devastates foes with mighty power, man and woman alike.
• Demon Hunter – can equip crossbows and launch explosives with a focus mainly on ranged combat.
• Monk – a religious warrior of the light, they are masters of the martial arts and speed.
• Witch Doctor – deemed the successor of the Necromancer. The Witch Doctor uses death, disease, curses and undead minions to swarm his would be opponents and drain their health and inflict impeding statuses on them.
• Wizard – manipulating the primal forces of the storm, arcane and even time itself, the Wizard is not afraid to destroy all in the path to victory. Successor of the Sorceress and Sorcerer.

We went with the Demon Hunter!

Diablo III is reminiscent of the original, but it looks much better thanks to major graphics improvements and advancements over the past decade. You also have new classes to play and the game has a realistic feel to it thanks to how well done the graphics are.