Now there are many thin and light products in the computer market, and more products with strong performance, but few products can balance thin and light with performance. For laptops that pursue power consumption control and thin and light, independent graphics cards are inherently incompatible options. In this embarrassing situation, it is obviously more important to improve the performance of core graphics cards, so Intel ® Sharp torch ™ Graphics card (Intel ® Iris ™ Graphics）。

Intel has long been equipped with a core graphics card for Core series processors. The purpose of this graphics card is to effectively control power consumption and improve the life of notebook computers while providing performance sufficient to meet the needs of daily office entertainment. After several generations of development, the performance indicators of Iris series core displays are close to many entry-level ones.

Parameter and performance analysis

From the perspective of performance and power consumption, Iris Ruiju graphics card is very suitable for use on lightweight and fashionable slim books. Taking Lenovo S41-70 as an example, this machine uses Intel Iris Ruiju graphics card, which is very thin and fashionable. The target group is young and fashionable white-collar workers who like to watch online videos, have requirements on the resolution of images and videos, occasionally need multimedia processing, and usually play mainstream games.

Its processor is Intel Core I5-5257U, which uses a dual core four thread broadwell architecture. The GPU part is the Iris Graphics 6100 Ruiju graphics card just mentioned. Other configurations include 4GB memory, 8GB+500GB hybrid hard disk.

Its Iris Graphics 6100 is a high-end product of the Broadwell GPU family. It is also the GPU of the i5 13 inch MacBook Pro. It is based on the 14nm process, integrates 48 EU execution units and H.265 decoder, has a 12.8GB/s bandwidth, has a graphics card frequency range of 300MHz to 1.05GHz, and supports OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 12.

Actual score

GFXBench is a well-known cross platform GPU test software. Although the project accuracy of PC platform is higher, leading to low performance scores, this is a rare test that can be compared horizontally with ARM platform products such as mobile phones and tablets. In the Manhattan scene of GFXBench3.0, it is 48.8 frames, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex scene is 102.1 frames.

3DMark is a full platform scoring software, which is tested under unified 1080P, with 981 points for Fire Strike scenarios; Ice Storm Extreme scene 46813 points. In contrast, the previous generation of Apple Mac Book Pro (Iris Graphics 5100) scored only 829 points for the Fire Strike mode and 39984 points for the Ice Storm mode in the 3Dmark test. The score of this machine is quite fierce. Between GT640M-650M, it even beats many middle and low-end independent graphics cards.

Multimedia processing test

Most users also need to do moderate and mild Photoshop image processing at ordinary times, especially fashionable men and women who love to take photos and repair pictures. At the same time, video editing and processing is also one of the daily needs of young fashionable white-collar workers. The simple PS processing and output can no longer stop the current Intel Ruiju graphics card. The experience in this area is not different from that of using a high configuration single display machine.

For video clips, we use Edius7 for simulation testing. We imported three 252m 4K videos, added simple post-processing such as transition animation, edited them into 2-minute videos, and output them in 1080P30 frame 8bit H264 format. Because the graphics card supports H264 hardware acceleration, the rendering output time is about 6 minutes, which is good enough for ordinary video clips.

In addition to ordinary video processing, our daily requirements for 4k resolution of video are also gradually increasing. Today's 4K resources are increasing, and many blockbusters have 4K versions to choose from. In addition to the finer picture, 4K videos also have the advantage of relatively high color tolerance, so they have also become the first choice for many fashionable people to watch movies locally. So we selected the classic 4K test video, and used the player provided by Win8.1 to test the hardware decoding ability of the machine.

The playback process is drag and play, and the CPU utilization is maintained at about 5%. Only when the film is skipped, the CPU utilization will slightly increase to about 15%. Intel ® Sharp torch ™ The graphics card is more than enough to meet the demand for high-definition video. 4K video playback, which used to consume resources, is now probably the most power saving operation.

Game Test

Young users naturally prefer to play games. Occasionally watching videos and playing games have become the daily life of most users. However, ordinary small and medium-sized games can no longer stop the current machine, so we tested its limits. In the test project, some large and medium-sized 3D games were included. Previously, these requirements could only be fulfilled by the bulky and heavy-duty high-performance notebook equipped with the unique display. In the past few years of rapid development of Nuclear Display, Iris graphics card has been able to support many large-scale 3D games independently.

We used the representative large-scale 3D game Extreme Speed 17 and League of Heroes LOL for game testing. Although I know that the Iris video card is very strong, I never expected that the Iris video card could run full effect at 1366 * 768 resolution, and the frame number could still be maintained at about 30 frames. However, if you want to have fun, you can turn down the special effect properly, and the frame number can be increased a lot.

The League of Heroes LOL, which is popular among young users and has a large number of players, can maintain about 40 frames of normal scenes under the default screen fineness, and can maintain about 25 frames even when all special effects are used. For daily play, turn off anti aliasing and vertical synchronization, and then you can uniformly adjust the special effect level to a higher level. The machine can also maintain more than 30 frames, and even the team battle scene can be played at 23 frames, which is completely ready to play.

summary

Six minutes after rendering the video, the highest temperature of the fuselage appears at the bottom of the screen, about 38 degrees; After 10 minutes of playing, the maximum temperature is 39.4 degrees. The heat control of the machine is good. For the super thin body, the heat control is mainly due to the super high efficiency of Iris core graphics card.

Whether running points or actual high-definition video playback, editing, or even large-scale 3D games, the Iris graphics card has demonstrated the performance and experience comparable to that of the mid tier independent graphics card, and the power consumption is only 23W, which is already as high as that of black technology.

This generation of Iris graphics card has shown unexpected strong performance and can completely replace the entry-level independent graphics card in the middle end. Its advantages are more in power consumption control, as well as saving the space and power required by the independent graphics card, which can better take into account the contradiction between the slim appearance, performance, heat and endurance of the notebook computer. For the fashionable user group with higher requirements for thinness and endurance, this is undoubtedly a more appropriate choice than the traditional stand alone notebook.