AMD Trinity Trounces Ivy Bridge in Diablo III

As most experts said before, AMD seems to be winning the Fusion bet. We were able to write about some of AMD’s achievements last year and we have another win to report today.

Llano and Brazos already conquered 43% of the desktop market, although AMD doesn’t have a superior x86 CPU in any price range. The ultrathin / ultralight / ultrabook bet seems to be also leaning towards the green side. When it comes to Diablo III and we mention that its predecessor was, and still is, one of the most popular games of the last decade, the question of what new CPU runs the game better naturally pops up.

There are many Diablo II players out there that did not really see any reason to upgrade their systems for the work they were doing, nor for browsing or music and movie playback. When given the opportunity and reason to upgrade, what would be the most advantageous solution, Trinity or Ivy Bridge? Well, if Diablo III is the tool to measure the two CPUs, Intel’s Ivy Bridge comes over 40% behind today’s winner, AMD’s Trinity. The hardware experts from legitreview.com have managed to test an Intel Ivy Bridge based laptop against AMD’s reference Trinity mobile platform.

When running the game in FullHD, Trinity achieves 48% better scores in Blizzard’s new game. Lowering the resolution to 1280 x 720, the lineup doesn’t change: AMD’s Trinity is still 40% faster than Ivy Bridge despite the much more modest x86 performance. The second most important fact of this test was that not only does AMD offer much better performance despite the “older” 32 nm technology and the x86 handicap, but the fact that the game is practically unplayable with Intel’s Ivy Bridge.

Managing only 17 FPS, Intel’s Ivy Bridge is clearly not acceptable for FullHD high-quality Diablo III gameplay. When comparing the price, we’ll only mention that the Core i7-3920XM tested against AMD’s platform is an Extreme Edition Intel CPU that works at 2900 MHz default frequency.

It can clock up to 3800 GHz when only one thread requires maximum performance, it has a huge 8 MB level 3 cache and a 55 watts TDP and yes, it is extremely expensive. At 1,096 USD, it costs more than Nvidia’s GTX 690 dual GPU card, and this is the price for the mobile CPU alone, not the whole laptop. If getting out the best CPU / APU for Diablo III was a bet, AMD has clearly won this one.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview