AMD's Richland vs. Intel's Haswell GPU on the Desktop: Radeon HD 8670D vs. Intel HD 4600
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 6, 2013 12:00 PM ESTMetro: Last Light
Metro: Last Light is the latest entry in the Metro series of post-apocalyptic shooters by developer 4A Games. Like its processor, Last Light is a game that sets a high bar for visual quality, and at its highest settings an equally high bar for system requirements thanks to its advanced lighting system. This doesn’t preclude it from running on iGPUs thanks to the fact that it scales down rather well, but it does mean that we have to run at fairly low resolutions to get a playable framerate.
Looking at desktop parts alone, Intel really suffers from not having a socketed GT3 SKU. Although HD 4600 is appreciably faster than HD 4000 (+30%), both Trinity and Richland are around 17% faster than it. As you'll see, Metro ends up being one of the smaller gaps between the two in our suite.
As memory bandwidth becomes the ultimate bounding condition, the gap between Richland and Haswell shrinks considerably. Note that on the HD 4600 side, the difference between DDR3-1333 and DDR3-2400 is only 10% here. Given the limited performance of the 20 EU Haswell GPU configuration, it doesn't seem like Intel is all that bandwidth limited here.
BioShock: Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
If Metro was an example of the worst case scenario for Richland, BioShock: Infinite is the best case scenario. Here the Radeon HD 8670D holds a 50% performance advantage over Intel's HD 4600 graphics.
The gap narrows a bit at higher resolution/quality settings, but it's still 39%.
Sleeping Dogs
A Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Richland is approaching 60 fps in our Sleeping Dogs benchmark at medium quality, definitely not bad at all. The advantage over Intel's HD 4600 is 34%.
The performance advantage grows a bit at the higher quality/resolution settings, however we drop below the line of playability. With most of these games, you can trade off image quality for resolution however.
Tomb Raider (2013)
The simply titled Tomb Raider is the latest entry in the Tomb Raider franchise, making a clean break from past titles in plot, gameplay, and technology. Tomb Raider games have traditionally been technical marvels and the 2013 iteration is no different. iGPUs aren’t going to have quite enough power to use its marquee feature – DirectCompute accelerated hair physics (TressFX) – however even without it the game still looks quite good at its lower settings, while providing a challenge for our iGPUs.
Tomb Raider is another title that doesn't put Richland in the best light, but it still ends up around 23% faster than Haswell GT2.
Battlefield 3
Our multiplayer action game benchmark of choice is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers at the high-end, but it’s still a challenge for more entry-level GPUs such as the iGPUs found on Intel and AMD's latest parts. Our goal here is to crack 60fps in our benchmark, as our rule of thumb based on experience is that multiplayer framerates in intense firefights will bottom out at roughly half our benchmark average, so hitting medium-high framerates here is not necessarily high enough.
Richland's performance in Battlefield 3 climbs around 30% over the HD 4600 regardless of quality/resolution.
Crysis 3
With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers, taking back the “most punishing game” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and the situation isn't too much better for entry-level GPUs at its lowest quality setting. In any case Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
Crysis is another benchmark where we see an increase in performance in the low 30% range.
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FriendlyUser - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
I see your point. But how many of these users need the CPU performance of the 4770? Do you think that the average business user needs a 4770 to do excel and answer emails? Will he even notice the difference? I can't really show you statistics, but I imagine that a big part of demanding users are in fact gamers.JDG1980 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
I understand why the average Intel CPU has an integrated graphics processor, but the K-series parts are specifically targeted at enthusiasts. Why don't they omit the IGP from those?Gigaplex - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
QuickSync is one possible answer. Another is that enthusiasts tend to swap out GPUs more frequently than other demographics so having a basic iGPU can come in handy for diagnostics now and then. And not all enthusiasts are gamers.dbcoopernz - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
Are you going to look at HTPC performance for Richland? e.g. madVR, refresh rate timings.RoyYoung - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
Thanks for the squeezing this out in such a short turn around. However I just don't think this is useful or new. I have never met anyone in the market for an i7 xxxxk cpu looking to play AAA game using the iGPU, have you? The iGPU in the i7 is just a bonus because it shares a die with the mobile counterpart, and gives you quick sync if prefer speed over quality in your transcoding.In today's market, the only reason to invest in the space, noise , heat, and money for a desktop gaming PC is to play games at 1080p or higher. Just get a Xbox if you need 720p. From the benchmarks its clear that neither the i-7 Haswell nor the Richland are playable at 900p let alone 1080p. On the other hand, the same tests at 768p on mobile Richland and Haswell parts makes perfect sense given the typical resolution and thermal of laptops. Given the power usage delta between the AMD and Intel desktop parts, I suspect the race is going to be a lot closer in the laptop race.
kallogan - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
Richland is really lame. I mean it brings barely peanuts over Trinty. Why even release that. And it's expensive. Desktop parts are really boring right now.kyuu - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
I'd be interested in seeing if you can get a stable RAM clock @ 2400MHz, and if so, how much Richland scales with that. Hope you take a look at when you do the more thorough piece.johnny_boy - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
APUs scale very well with faster memory almost regardless of timings. I'd like to see Richland benchmarks with DDR3 2400, though I can already make a pretty good guess of what those figures would look like.Samastrike - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
So what I'm seeing here is very similar GPU performance to trinity for $20 more? Except in 3Dmark06 where it suddenly has a huge jump. Doesn't strike me as worth it.firewall597 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
I'm a little disappointed that AMD cared to release this as a new model generation at all. There's barely enough argument to avoid throwing the "rebranding" flag. Shoulda just fit the upclocked parts appropriately into the current gen's numbering and adjusted prices accordingly.The effort is appreciated always, but the marketing is somewhat misleading from the surface.