If you’re into the multiplayer element of BF3, you’d really want a faster GPU we’d suggest NVIDIA’s GT 555M or AMD’s HD 6730M as a more reasonable target to handle BF3 at our Value (medium) settings. Battlefield 3 on the other hand is simply a beast-notice that Llano A8 along with Sony’s VAIO SE and Z2 with discrete GPUs all fail to break 30 FPS. Civ5 is actually still playable at low frame rates, since it’s not a real-time game, but all things considered we’d still like to see >30 FPS. Of the seven games we’ve selected for our current tests, two fail to deliver acceptable frame rates: Battlefield 3 and Civilization V.
We don’t have a huge selection of laptop hardware (yet) for our 2012 gaming suite, and Ivy Bridge tends to place near the bottom of the Value gaming charts, but that’s only part of the story. What we will do is show how HD 4000 compares to HD 3000, HD 6620G (Llano A8), HD 6630M, and GT 640M. We won’t provide a complete list of results here, but you can find those in Mobile Bench (including Mainstream and Enthusiast performance results, though not surprisingly HD 4000 falls well short of playability at those settings). Along with the 2012 suite, we also ran all of the gaming tests from our 2011 suite at our medium detail settings. The goal of our 2012 game tests is to get reasonable quality rather than bare minimum quality, so we’ve set the bar at around medium detail for our Value settings and high detail for our Mainstream settings. We’ll start with our current 2012 gaming suite, which we’ve discussed previously. We’ve run a larger than normal set of games this time around. Ivy Bridge HD 4000: Medium Quality Gaming Now Possible