Besides the 22nm Die shrink and the Tri-Gate transistors the biggest novelty is the integrated GPU on steroïds. The performance of the HD 3000 was not really suitable for any gaming at all. Intel revised the iGPU drastically and claims extra performance of up to 40%. We took the liberty to retest the HD3000 of the i5-2500K and i7 2700K and put them against our two HD 4000 equipped Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Testbed :

• HD 3000 : Intel i5 2500K and i7 2700K
• HD 4000 : Intel i5 3570K and i7 3770K
• 8Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ RAM
• Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H F5 bios
• Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green

Firrst up are the iGPU's head to head in a few games :

As you directly will notice : The HD 3000 is no match for the HD 4000. In High detail mode Far Cry 2 is even almost playable at 1600 x 1200 resolution. Which is quite amasing if you ask me for an integrated GPU. Even Crysis II at "Gamer" detail setting manages to stay above the 30FPS mark at 1024 x 768.

Even F1 2011 is perfectly playable at 1280 x 1024 resolution And this is done on High detail setting. Never thought to play this game on a non dedicated graphics card. Similar FPS output with Capcoms Zombie slasher Resident Evil 5. Way ahead of the HD 3000 powered CPU's. Intel is slowly but steadily catching up to look for the iGPU performance crown. Though the AMD APU's are really powerfull in the graphics department, yet lack raw CPU power.

Madshrimps demo'ed Dirt 3 during the Intel Resellers conference days on the HD 4000. At 1280 x 1024 res the drivers experienced a lag free race environment. This test was done with Medium detail settings and MSAA 2X filtering set. So not too bad image quality at all.

iGPU Overclocking:

Let's see if we can push some more FPS out of Intels iGPU. We tested with 4500mhz versus the stock clocks and found no worthy FPS increase. So final CPU speed isn't a determining factor to boost FPS. Time to overclock the iGPU. Rated at stock at 1150MHz. With easy selectable dividers we pushed up to 1300MHz with no voltage increase. With our i5-3570K 1450MHz was perfectly stable with + 0.075. For 1600MHz + 0.12 was required to remain stable during the game tests. Sadly the i7 3770K's iGPU as not stable at 1600mhz so we left out them results and just focus on the ones obtained with the i5 3570K.

Improving with abound 4-5 FPS in Far Cry 2, by upping the clockfrequency from 1150MHz to 1600MHz. Pretty solid FPS improvement, but how do newer games react ? Dirt 3 at the lowest resolution gains a mere 2 FPS. But at the more demanding 1280 x 1024 and 1366 x 768 we gain over 7FPS, which is quite a noticeable boost.

Similar overclocking result with F1 2011. The lowest resolution seems to be maxed out in FPS. Again a solid increase in performance at higher resolutions : 4 - 5FPS can mean the difference between fluid or jerky gameplay.

With the AMD lineup upping the system RAM speed can boost performance too. Do the HD 4000's react in a similar manner ? We upped the RAM speed from 1600mhz C8-8-8-24 to a whopping 2666Mhz C10-12-12-30. Again a 3-5 FPS gain depending on the resolution tested.