Conclusion

At this point we will first of all talk about Haswell before we then move on to discuss global improvements regarding integrated graphics processors.

During our testing of Haswell we soley focussed on the HD 4600 graphics unit. Since Intel increased the number of execution units for the HD 4600 by 25 percent when directly comparing it to Ivy Bridge's HD 4000, we expected that the overall performance improvement should also be somewhere in the region of 25 percent. According to our performance index we've seen performance go up by 27 percent. After all it is quite surprising to see that there is an overall almost perfect linear scaling with the number of execution units. Percentage wise the largest jumps were when it comes we look at Unigine Heaven 4.0 Extreme Preset. In this case the HD 4600 is a whopping 52 percent faster than the HD 4000. When it comes to games the largest improvement was seen when running Crysis 3, where we measured 50 percent difference.
Overall we can say that Intel's HD 4600 IGP is suitable for casual gaming at 1280 x 1024 resolution with low graphics details. In certain cases it would even be possible to increase the detail level but in other cases is would also make sense to set an even lower resolution. What you really shouldn't expect are miracles: the HD 4600 is an improvemtn over the HD 4000 but it's certainly not a revolution. It will be very interesting to see what the HD 5200 Pro is capable of. Since we've seen an almost linear scaling from HD 4000 to HD 4600, when comparing performance numbers with the number of execution units, we would expect HD 5200 Pro to be more than twice as fast than HD 4600. In this case you could then even consider to choose a higher resolution than 1280 x 1024 in games our increase the detail level significantly.

Looking at IGP's these day on a global scale by putting things into perspective, while adding AMD's A10-5800K as well as A10-6800K to the comparison tables, we see that these days, IGP's can compete with discrete entry level graphics cards from three and a half years ago. Since we were interested to see how much faster a lower mid range card is (GTX 550 Ti) we ran the same tests on this card and ou performance index tells us that there is almost a factor of three inbetween this card and today's IGP's.
At this point we want to put Intel's improvements into perspective. Maybe you remember that Sandy Bridge first came to market roughly two years ago. Within those two years Intel has been able to double graphics performance of their IGP's, which means that even in this context Intel is considering Moore's Law as the way to go to be successful in this industry. And then the company still has an ace up their sleeve with HD 5200 Pro, which will certainly be substantially faster than the HD 4600 we've tested here. Overall this also means that Intel is starting to apply pressure on AMD, when it comes to IGP's. AMD will soon have to release there GCN based APU's to remain the leading company, when it comes to IGP's.