Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage with a GTX 680 and i7-3770K at 4.2GHz.

Next, up is Haswell’s i7-4770K at the same 4.2GHz.There is a small increase in FPS just as there is in OPS.  Interestingly, i7-920 at 4.2GHz and paired with the same stock GTX 680, scored 35511.

3DMark 11

Now we look at Futuremark’s 2011 DX11 graphics-heavy test. Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz paired with a reference clocked GTX 680 scores 9531, while the i7-4770K gets 9652.  Our i7-920 with the same GTX 680 scored 9223, but the GeForce drivers make much more of a difference than architectural improvements.

Like with Vantage, Haswell is faster than Ivy Bridge. which in turn, is faster than Bloomfield in this synthetic graphics test. Now let’s check CPU graphics

3DMark 13

This evaluation is focused on the Core i7-4770K in gaming.  Here are Haswell’s detailed results with a score of 6400:Eventually, we reached 6465 on the basic test with i7-4770K, and 3240 on the Extreme, while we got 6446 with i7-3770K and 3248 on Extreme.  Using the synthetic tests, we can conclude that a GTX 680 is not enough to differentiate mildly overclocked Ivy Bridge from Haswell.

Now let’s compare our overclocked Core i7-920 versus our Ivy Bridge i7-3770K using a GTX 680 at both stock and also overclocked speeds.

The Game Benchmarks with the GTX 680 and the GTX 780 Ti

Here are the benches for the Core i7-4770K at 4.2GHz versus Core i7-3770 also at 4.2GHz. All games have their setting completely maxed out and levels of AA are identified on the chart. The GTX 680 is run at reference clock speeds.

The first chart uses the GTX 680. The first results column is the Haswell i7-4770K at 4.2GH versus Ivy Bridge i7-3700K at 4.2GHz in the second column.   Please note that when we benchmarked Call of Pripyat with the GTX 680 and Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz we got 37fps at 2560×1600 and 61.1fps at 1920×1080 although Geforce drivers will make the biggest differences.   It is a completely mixed bag.  It appears that our GTX 680 is not enough to differentiate processors at either 1920×1080 nor at 2560×1600 resolutions in games any more than in synthetic gaming benchmarks.  We now install our GTX 780 Ti and compare again.We see a total reversal and a clear trend emerges with the Core i7-4770K being faster than Ivy Bridge i7-4770K at 4.2GHz.  Only Crysis 3 shows Ivy 0.1 fps faster and it is very GPU-dependent.  The original Crysis shows Haswell significantly faster, especially at 1920×1080.  There are only two games that we tested with our Bloomfield i7-920 at 4.2GHz, Crysis and Call of Pripyat, but that was with older drivers (GF 301.xx).  However, the games are quite old and most of the driver improvements were made long ago, especially with CoP.

But what about scaling.  Well, let’s just use the GTX 780 Ti and compare at stock 3.7GHz (turbo), 4.2GHz, 4.4GHz, 4.5GHz and even at 4.6GHz (which was barely stable for gaming)

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Main Summary Charts

The Big Picture

If you are a gamer, you can definitely “get by” with an older CPU. However, we saw the need to upgrade to Haswell and to Ivy Bridge before it, more strongly indicated by most tasks other than gaming.  Let’s head for our conclusion.