Intel HD Graphics 3000 Performance Review

by Ajay
(Chennai, India)

If you're having trouble keeping up with the names of Intel's graphics products, then you're certainly not alone. Two generations ago, the G45 chipset gave us the GMA X4500HD, and then the number was lopped off with the introduction of Clarkdale CPUs, leaving us with just GMA HD. Now we've even lost the 'GMA' portion, while also regaining a lower number to represent Sandy Bridge graphics. Please welcome Intel's HD Graphics 3000 (12 EU parts) and HD Graphics 2000 (6 EU parts) to the stage.

Intel's new graphics design is quite a different beast from its previous efforts. For a start, we now have a single, monolithic chip design with the graphics and CPU portions on the same silicon, as well as a brand new internal ring bus, enabling the graphics core to share a portion of the CPU's ultra low latency L3 cache. It also has far more memory bandwidth, not to mention faster direct CPU access, because we've finally lost the antique front side bus. Even Clarkdale had a limited, fixed front side bus system between the CPU cores and the separate die containing the graphics, memory and PCI-E controllers.