As usual in our WoW testing, we used Fraps to measure frame rates on an automated trip from Crushblow to The Krazzworks, changing graphics quality presets between flights and leaving MSAA at 1x.

We saved some good news for last. The nine million or so WoW subscribers may be relieved to know that all four of our platforms can play their favorite MMORPG at low settings. Even the Core i3-3220 averages more than two times the average FPS requirement. The trick with WoW, though, is that the game adds a pretty sizable processing load as you step up the preset chain. This is obvious as you fly over the landscape. In Low settings, the trees are largely denuded and fog obscures a lot of ground detail. WoW reveals quite a bit even in stepping up to Medium detail.
Again, WoW delivers the most visual punch in stepping from Low to Good settings. The vibrancy of scenes really pops as you lose a lot of that obscuring mist. Textures gain more depth and shadows more realism at higher settings, but if you only have enough overhead for one or two steps up the quality scale, AMD’s Trinity will get you there while the latest Core i3 chips will not.


World of Warcraft's Good quality preset gives you the best balance of graphics quality and performance on AMD's A10-5800K. The High quality setting is just too demanding, particularly if you find yourself in busy raids.
Still, let’s not lose sight of the fact that all four of these chips deliver excellent playability at Low settings. If you’re more concerned about enjoying the game and its community and less worried about the look of it all, your barrier to entry in a high-def setting remains low.
- Can The Latest Integrated Graphics Engines Game At 1080p?
- Professional Opinion: Gaming On Integrated Graphics
- Professional Opinion: Gaming On Integrated Graphics, Cont.
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: MW3 And Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Skyrim And Deus Ex: HR
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, And Witcher 2
- Benchmark Results: DiRT Showdown
- Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft
- Second-Generation APUs: Playable, If You Compromise Detail



AMD really deliver stinging jabs at Intel with its APU's. I hope the pricing would be OK.
With next gen consoles coming out next year, game devs will target them. Hence the minimum standard for games will rise, making the next gen games much slower on the iGPU's. So both AMD and Intel will have to increase performance much more in the next 1-2 years.
tl;dr : next gen games will run poorly on these igpu's as next gen consoles will set the minimum performance standard.
Keep in mind, though, that that's exactly what's going to allow AMD and Intel to advance their hardware faster than games will, as they were discussing in the article (first page of the interview). Look how far Fusion and HD Graphics have come over the past 3 years, and look how long the previous console generation lasted - if that trend is anything to go by, I'm sure integrated graphics could easily become a viable budget gaming option in the next few years.
Actually, the A10 and A8 have somewhat superior graphics compared to current consoles. Current consoles can't even play in 720p as well as these AMD IGPs played 1080p despite being a more optimized platform, so that this is true is kinda obvious IMO. Also, new games would simply mean dropping resolution for these APUs. They wouldn't be unable to play new games, just probably at 1080p and 16xx by 900/10xx resolutions too.
Intel probably isn't very motivated by gaming performance for their IGPs and they're supposedly making roughly 100% performance gains per generation with their top-end IGPs anyway, so they're working on growing IGP performance. AMD also gets to use GCN in their next APU and I don't think that I need to explain the implications there, especially if they go the extra mile with using their high-density library tech too.
How about one more article with Ivy Bridge i3s and the 6570 on both setups. I want to see how much better gamin performance will be with AMD's hybrid cards.
AMD really deliver stinging jabs at Intel with its APU's. I hope the pricing would be OK.
With market share going down, there could be less economy of scale and less investment, leading to stagnation and very high prices.
For some time, you will still be able to buy a dedicated GPU, but it will be a niche product that costs you an arm and a leg, and soon hardware support will dwindle as producers move to smaller form factors.
Server -> intel
Mobile -> ARM
console -> ??? (amd should play in this area)
With next gen consoles coming out next year, game devs will target them. Hence the minimum standard for games will rise, making the next gen games much slower on the iGPU's. So both AMD and Intel will have to increase performance much more in the next 1-2 years.
tl;dr : next gen games will run poorly on these igpu's as next gen consoles will set the minimum performance standard.
I'm not sure it's accurate to say that consoles play on a game's absolute minimum settings, disregarding resolution. With that in mind, the PC versions would still have graphics options to tune down compared to the what the console versions would have their settings configured, I would think.
I do wonder how good these Trinity APU's could typically overclock, and how they'd perform there, along with their RAM overclocked to a reasonable level to compensate for the more graphics processing power.
More so, I'm wondering if the PSCheck method where you manipulate core P-states would have a substantial affect with mainly dual-threaded titles.
Also maybe I'd like to see if Dual-graphics performs better (scaling) and has a wider compatibility range than Llano's.
They did what they could on their 32nm process node that they had to stick to. Kaveri, assuming that it is true that it has GCN, will make undoubtedly some much more huge improvements over Trinity than Trinity did over Llano.