Gigabyte BRIX Pro And Intel Iris Pro Graphics Review

BioShock Infinite is clear game-of-the-year material. The floating city of Columbia is one of the most evocative, intense, and gorgeous environments we've ever seen in a PC game -- but how much you like it may depend on what sort of visual wizardry you prefer. BioShock Infinite is built on Unreal Engine 3, and while it pushes that framework's capabilities into the stratosphere, there's a clear difference between BioShock Infinite and, say, Crysis 3. BioShock Infinite emphasizes light, color and motion, and while the characters look more exaggerated and cartoon-like than some other games, they still look great. We tested the game at various resolutions with its DX11 code path with DOF effects enabled.

Bioshock Infinite

In the first, low resolution, CPU-limited Bioshock test, the Core i7-4770R in the BRIX Pro is able to keep pace with AMD's latest offering and offers a sizable gain over Intel's previous generation, likely due to memory bandwidth.

In the GPU-limited high res test, here again, the field is grouped pretty close together, with the exception of the previous generations of Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, which were left far behind by the Haswell-based BRIX Pro, which almost doubled their performance.  What's clear now is that, at least with Crystal Well and Iris Pro 5200 graphics, Intel has caught up to AMD's integrated graphics core performance, even the most recent GCN iterations found in Kaveri.