AMD Trinity vs. Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge (Game Video)

Skeptics will probably say it's not worth making an opinion before people publish some independent benchmark and gaming tests, but everyone else should be quite impressed by the gameplay demo AMD made at Computex 2012.

The folks at NetbookNews have brought us a nice video of AMD's A-Series Trinity completely blowing Intel's Ivy Bridge out of the water. Two screens were placed side by side. One received video from a computer based on a Core i7 CPU, while the other got footage from an AMD system. The difference between frame rates is more than clear. Intel's machine didn't quite manage to scrounge up a passable performance while the other one ran perfectly fine. It makes it easy to understand why AMD's A-Series were given the Best of Choice of Computex award. In fact, the game ran so fine that the person holding the game pad couldn't quite keep up and slammed the car into obstacles. Twice. One of the occasions even left the car totally stuck.

Jabs at player mishaps aside though, we quite like what we see, but we can't help but feel that the comparison between Trinity and Core i7 won't make as much of a difference as it should. Core i7 Ivy Bridge is a high-end platform while AMD's APUs are mainstream chips. The better graphics performance of the latter is definitely a boon, but while this will give Core i3 and Core i5 trouble, it won't really matter to buyers of Core i7.

The reason is that anyone with enough money to buy a Core i7 system will undoubtedly have enough cash, and the disposition, to buy an add-in graphics card too. Maybe not one as absurdly powerful as the 8 GB Dual GTX 680 Mars III, but any GTX 680/670 will do. AMD Radeon are just as likely, but that doesn't change the fact that consumers will choose against buying Trinity. Nevertheless, AMD wanted to prove a point and it did it well.

Posted in: Hardware, Review