Benchmark Results: Virtu In Action
We plucked Battlefield: Bad Company 2 out of our usual benchmark suite, and were immediately impressed to see this DirectX 11-based title running through the Intel HD Graphics output at 1920x1080.
The performance drop attributable to Virtu is relatively minor in both cases. Although the GeForce GTX 580 takes a larger performance hit, I still consider >90 frames per second in Bad Company 2 well worth picking up Quick Sync support.
We see the same situation in F1 2010, as AMD’s Radeon HD 6970 loses a paltry three frames per second, while the GeForce GTX 580 takes a roughly 10% performance hit. Nevertheless, 70 frames per second are still ample to enjoy this title at 1920x1080 and 4x anti-aliasing.
Same story, different game. A relatively minor performance drop doesn’t affect playability in any meaningful way.
This time it’s the AMD card taking a larger penalty, while Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580 comes out barely scathed at all.
In three of four cases, we were able to run a DirectX 11-based title through Intel’s integrated graphics engine. And World of Warcraft might employ DirectX 9, but there’s no way we’d see such compelling results at 1920x1080 using Ultra quality settings and Intel’s modest integrated core.
