How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006?

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. AMD integrated graphics lead over Intel on all the platforms and really dominated Intel in the most recent generation. The AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ processor with AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics on the A75 chipset motherboard was 62% faster than the Intel Core i3-2105 ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and the Intel H67 chipset motherboard at a resolution of 1680×1050.

Results: We tried to push the envelope a little and ran 1024×768 with medium image quality and found the AMD A8-3850 was actually 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 8x improvement in graphics performance since the Intel G965 chipset and AMD has had a solid 6x performance improvement since the AMD 690G chipset.