An Expreview community member ran benchmarks comparing the performance of the Intel HD 4000 graphics embedded into its upcoming 22 nm "Ivy Bridge" Core i5-3570K, comparing it to the integrated graphics of Core i5-2500K, and discrete graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 240. These tests are endorsed by the site. The suite of benchmarks included games that aren't quite known to be very taxing on graphics hardware by today's standards, yet are extremely popular; games such as StarCraft II, Left4Dead 2, DiRT 3, Street Fighter IV. Some of the slightly more graphics-intensive benchmarks included Far Cry 2 and 3DMark Vantage. All benchmarks were run at 1280 x 720 resolution.
The Intel HD 4000 graphics core beats the HD 3000 hands down, with performance leads as high as 122% in a particular test. The chip produces more than playable frame-rates with Left4Dead 2 and Street Fighter IV, both well above 50 FPS, even DiRT 3 and Far Cry 2 run strictly OK, over 30 FPS. StarCraft II is where it produced under 30 FPS, so the chip might get bogged down in intense battles. A mainstream discrete GeForce or Radeon is a must. On average, the graphics core embedded into the Core i5-3570K was found to be 67.25% faster than the one on the Core i5-2500K.
When pitted against a 2+ year old GeForce GT 240, the Core i5-3570K struggles. In StarCraft II, it's 53.64% slower. On average, the GT 240 emerged 56.25% faster. A decent effort by Intel to cash in on the entry-level graphics. We are hearing nice things about the HD video playback and GPU acceleration capabilities of Intel's HD 4000 core, and so there's still something to look out for. Agreed, comparing the i5-3570K to the i5-2500K isn't a 100% scientific comparison since the CPU performance also factors in, but it was done purely to assess how far along Intel has come with its graphics.
