After having the Core i5-2500K – I came to a sudden realization that I haven’t benchmarked the HD 3000, although I have been using it for some Guild Wars 2 session when I’m without a graphic card. So here it is.
The GPU
The Performance
Seeing it’s an onboard GPU, the tests were confined to 720p. 2 tests of 720p tests were done, one with the usual details as was used in other graphic card review, and the other is on lowest setting to see how the onboard GPU copes with it.
Metro 2033
Settings [right side for LOW]
Card Average FPS Average FPS [low] Intel HD 3000 7.0 16.5
Heaven 3.0
Settings [right side for LOW]
Card Average FPS Average FPS [low] Intel HD 3000 6.2 12.5
As you can see from both tests above, going from the usual settings to LOW settings didn’t help at all but I can’t say this applies to every case. Lost Planet 2 and Alien vs Predator refused to run at all when they detected the HD 3000 so it’s really bad there. 🙁
All is not lost though, I’ve personally played Guild Wars 2 with the HD 3000 at 1680×1050 on lowest of details and it still looks decent. Don’t expect the same for other games out there.
Conclusion
So there you have it. The onboard GPU just doesn’t cut it for games. Even at the lowest settings, it’s unplayable at 720p so this means you have to go for an even lower resolution to play. Imagine how blocky would the graphic be at 640×480 on a HD or Full HD screen.
If you want to play some games, consider spending on something like say the HD 6670. It’s below RM 300 now and allows you better in-game display quality.
🙂 Whether or not you want this GPU is not of your choice, as long as you bought an Intel processor that has the system embedded, you already have it!
Base Clock 850 MHz Boost Clock 1100 MHz Memory Clock System Shared
IGP Variants
- Core i3-2105: 1100 MHz
- Core i5-2500K: 1100 MHz
Memory
Memory Size System Shared Memory Type System Shared Memory Bus System Shared Bandwidth System Dependent
Render Config
Shading Units 96 TMUs 12 ROPs 2 Execution Units 12
Theoretical Performance
Pixel Rate 2.200 GPixel/s Texture Rate 13.20 GTexel/s FP32 [float] 211.2 GFLOPS
Board Design
Slot Width IGP TDP unknown Outputs Motherboard Dependent
If you're having trouble keeping up with the names of Intel's graphics products, then you're certainly not alone. Two generations ago, the G45 chipset gave us the GMA X4500HD, and then the number was lopped off with the introduction of Clarkdale CPUs, leaving us with just GMA HD. Now we've even lost the 'GMA' portion, while also regaining a lower number to represent Sandy Bridge graphics. Please welcome Intel's HD Graphics 3000 [12 EU parts] and HD Graphics 2000 [6 EU parts] to the stage.
Intel's new graphics design is quite a different beast from its previous efforts. For a start, we now have a single, monolithic chip design with the graphics and CPU portions on the same silicon, as well as a brand new internal ring bus, enabling the graphics core to share a portion of the CPU's ultra low latency L3 cache. It also has far more memory bandwidth, not to mention faster direct CPU access, because we've finally lost the antique front side bus. Even Clarkdale had a limited, fixed front side bus system between the CPU cores and the separate die containing the graphics, memory and PCI-E controllers.
Not only that, but the core frequency of Sandy Bridge's graphics system is higher than ever at 850MHz, and you can use TurboBoost to push this up to 1,100MHz on the Core i5-2500K, and 1,350MHz on the Core i7-2600K.
DirectX support has also been updated to version 10.1 from 10.0, and there's naturally support for DisplayPort and DVI too, with the latter finally being updated to the dual-link standard. Similarly, HDMI support has been updated to 1.4a as well, which includes support for 120Hz 3D Blu-ray movies on top of all the features from previous HDMI standard, including picture-in-picture, bit-streaming audio and dual audio streams, 24Hz support and the usual ClearVideoHD de-interlacing. The graphics system also enables two digital outputs to be used simultaneously.
However, as with Intel's GMA HD system, not every Sandy Bridge desktop CPU features the same level of power. In fact, the Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K are the only desktop CPUs that feature the full count of12 EU graphics cores. It's also worth noting that you can't use the graphics core for video transcoding if you have a discrete graphics card installed either, as there's no way of switching between graphics systems.
Conversely, all the new mobile Sandy Bridge parts pack in the full count of 12 EUs, which means that all future Sandy Bridge laptops will get a healthy dose of graphics performance.
Finally, it's worth mentioning which motherboard chipsets support the new technology, which include the H67 H61 and the future Z67 PCH chips, although the budget-end H61 won't allow you to overclock the graphics processor. Current H67 boards on the market feature options for increasing the clock speed of the System Agent die-area that houses the processor's graphics system, as well as enabling you to tweak the voltage applied to it.