Intel Haswell CPU Graphics Twice As Good As Ivy Bridge

The HD 3000 graphics chips in Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs (central processing units) barely scraped a pass in the gameplay department, and Ivy Bridge HD 4000 actually did acceptably, but the HD 4500 in the upcoming Haswell chips is ready to eclipse them both. 

Given how advanced the GPUs (graphics processing units) in AMD APUs are (accelerated processing units), Intel can't exactly afford to skip the IGP improvement (integrated graphics processor). 

Sure enough, the HD 4500 iGPU in the next-generation Intel CPUs will have double the performance of HD 4000. 

Intel even proved this during the now elapsed Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013), by running a DirectX 11 game on two different systems. 

One PC (personal computer), the full desktop, had a Haswell chip, while a laptop ran a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650. 

Granted, the game wasn't exactly the most demanding DirectX 11 title in the world (Dirt 3), but it did, at least, use Full HD resolution in both cases (without AA). 

It bears noting that the Haswell chip didn't run the game as well as the NVIDIA-enabled GPU did, but it still did it smoothly enough. 

Intel did not provide any benchmark scores, which might be owed to the fact that it still needs to work on drivers. 

Better hardware is all well and good, but driver optimizations often help boost frame rates as well. When Intel finally releases the Haswell CPU series, there should be a new video driver up for grabs as well, one that will perhaps run Dirt 3 and any other games better than the Haswell prototype desktop does. 

Now, the only thing missing is a comparison with an AMD A-Series APU. If HD 4500 really is twice as good as HD 4000, it might be good enough to match Radeon HD 7000/8000 series too.

Source: Softpedia.com