HD 4000 Processor Graphics and Quick Sync Performance

Obviously with the jump from HD 4000 to HD 2500 graphics on the Core i5-3470 desktop processor, we were curious to see how the new integrated graphics performs in real-world gaming. To test it, we pit the Core i7-3770K against the Core i5-3470 and also included a discrete graphics solution to mix things up. I chose to test these CPUs against AMD’s Radeon HD 5570/6570 card that you can currently find on the market for $50-60.  

I had some requests to include another discrete level card like the GTX 560 Ti in these graphs, but in truth, it skewed the results so heavily that it made seeing the performance differences between the HD 4000 and HD 2500 graphics pretty difficult.  

Ouch, first indications are that that the HD 2500 is half the speed of the HD 4000 and even behind the HD 3000 from Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors.  

A similar story here in our Left 4 Dead 2 testing with the HD 2500 about half the speed of the HD 4000 found in the Core i7-3770K.

The same is seen here in Deus Ex: Human Revolution…

…and in DiRT 3.

Intel is actually being pretty honest with its marketing names on their processor graphic solutions. The HD 2500 found on the lower cost Ivy Bridge processors is indeed slower than the HD 3000 found in last generations Sandy Bridge CPUs. It is also producing about half the performance of the HD 4000 found in the higher end IVB options which always leads to the same question: why put the higher end graphics on a processor that will likely NOT use but instead add in a discrete solution? Intel obviously wants you to have to pay for that higher end graphics if you are going to utilize it, so keeping a price premium between the Core i5 and the Core i7 lineup is doing that nicely – though it really hurts the idea of the integrated graphics being a "value" for the consumer.

Quick Sync Performance

For our basic Quick Sync testing we used the latest version of Cyberlink’s MediaShow Espresso to convert a 1.8GB 720p H.264 video file down to a more reasonable size for an iPod.

The results are pretty damn impressive:

The fixed function hardware used for the QuickSync operation is the same across the HD 2500 and HD 4000 graphics solutions so the Core i5-3470 performs just as well as the Core i7-3770K.

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