At its 2013 International CES booth, Intel exhibited a side-by-side comparison of two systems, one running its next-generation Core "Haswell" processor's integrated graphics, the HD 4500 GT3 (all components enabled), and the other a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 GPU. A highly forgiving DirectX 11-generation title, DiRT 3, was made to run on both GPUs. Visitors noted that even if not as smooth as the GTX 650, Intel's Haswell iGPU did produce playable frame-rates.
Sources close to the company have been claiming a significant, in fact, 100 percent performance lead of the Haswell iGPU over previous-generation HD 4000 iGPU featured in today's Core "Ivy Bridge" chips. If true, Intel's graphics may have come perilously close to, or even caught up with, AMD's A-Series "Trinity" line of APUs, which feature the fastest integrated graphics processor ever made.
