In the first of our Haswell review series, we covered the worst-case performance of the much-improved Intel HD Graphics by testing it at max resolution and details. However, these scenarios are not the ideal conditions for the design and Intel’s fourth Gen HDGPU runs much better at moderate settings such as 720p.

In this edition, we have tested Intel’s HD Graphics 4600 at several realistic and best case game settings with just three very popular titles, Battlefield 3, Bioshock Infinite and DIRT 3. Given Battlefield 3’s popularity, we even dive down to the individual frame level to show the level of smoothness of reported frame rates for this game with Intel and NVIDIA graphics. Battlefield 3 running on Intel HD 4600 had an acceptable frame rate but was not smooth on automatic detail settings.

Test Specifications and Methodology

The aim of this review is to show real world and near real world performance of the mid-range Intel HD Graphics 4600 GPU,code named 'GT2' built into high end desktop Haswell parts, with similar tech built into many Haswell laptops.

We have listed our benchmarks in order of relevance to real world game play.

We could have setup a replicable test case for Battlefield 3 but this does not demonstrate real-world game play for one of the most popular first person shooters.

We used an older discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 GPU to demonstrate technology leaps over generations and years, as well as to show that there always will be a need for performance discrete graphics. Throwing raw power through memory bandwidth, clock speed and compute cores always wins.Even  Intel knew this when they tried to develop Larrabee for consumer graphics and demonstrated this consecutively with Ivy Bridge and Haswell's integrated graphics, by increasing the number of execution units and clock speeds.

A caveat of our approach is hardware vendors have optimised their device drivers and the game code itself for these few titles. Our previous Haswell review used a gamut of tests.

This is somewhat the point really, it is ideal to have a hardware vendor optimise for independent software vendors. The end user receives a better experience in the end but analysts must be careful of how they quantify these experiences.