Intel Core i5-3427U: Ivy Bridge For Ultrabooks

Name: Intel Core i5-3427U
Brand: Intel

by Dave Altavilla — Thursday, May 31, 2012, 12:00 AM EDT

Gaming Performance: Just Cause 2 and Far Cry 2

Just Cause 2

DX10.1 Gaming Performance

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 was released in March '10, from developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. The game makes use of the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the similarly named original. It is set on the fictional island of Panau in southeast Asia, and you play the role of Rico Rodriquez. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article using one of the built-in demo runs called Desert Sunrise. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings. This game also supports a few CUDA-enabled features, but they were left disabled to keep the playing field level.

The Radeon HD 7660G graphics engine in the AMD A10-4600M Trinity APU easily outpaced Intel's integrated graphics in the Just Cause 2 benchmark. Regardless, the low power Ivy Bridge Core i5 dual-core offers a sizable performance gain over the previous generation Sandy Bridge Core i5 in this test; on the order of about 45% faster than the Core i5-2467M.

Far Cry 2

DirectX 10 Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 was one of the more visually impressive games to be released when it hit the scene a couple of years back. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the test systems in this article with the FarCry 2 benchmark tool using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map.

The Radeon HD 7660G within the AMD A10-4600M Trinity APU also performed well in our FarCry 2 tests though the numbers are a more tightly grouped here. The Core i5-3427U low power Ivy Bridge CPU once again steps past even the quad-core Sandy Bridge processor, but in any event, you'll need to turn down image quality or resolution to get playable frame rates in either game engine tested here.