Gaming Performance

3DMark06

Futuremark 3DMark06 shows clearly that Intel HD Graphics is considerably faster than the previous generation Intel’s graphics core. The advantage sometimes hits 50%, which allows Clarkdale based system to outperform even an integrated AMD one.

3DMark Vantage

The previous generation Intel graphics accelerator, GMA X4500, scored pretty high in the newer test, 3DMark Vantage. The results demonstrated by Intel HD Graphics, however, turned out even higher: the gain reached about 30%! By the way, relatively poor performance of AMD 785G in this test most likely has nothing to do with the Intel driver optimization for this benchmark. At least, renaming 3DMarkVantage.exe file didn’t affect the final score chart in any way.

Quake 4

Although Quake 4 is not a new game, it still poses a serious problem for integrated graphics, which must be connected with high requirements to the video memory bandwidth. As a result, only AMD 785G based platform can boast more or less acceptable results and only in 1024x768 resolution. Intel HD Graphics is falling far behind the latter. Moreover, graphics core overclocking has barely any effect on the performance of our Core i3-540 based system.

Unreal Tournament 3

Although new Intel graphics core outperforms Radeon HD 4200 in Unreal Tournament 3, the fps rate is still pretty low.

TrackMania Nations Forever

Integrated graphics adapters perform surprisingly well in a popular racing arcade called TrackMania Nations Forever. In fact, they are very fast when tested with medium quality settings allowing comfortable gaming experience even in 1280x1024. The system built around the new Intel processor proved the fastest in this game. Even at the nominal GPU clock it outperformed the system with an overclocked AMD 785G, which until today used to be the fastest integrated chipset out there.