Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s New Upgrades Do not Live-Up to the Hype

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) recently announced a major upgrade of its 4th-generation processors, which Digital Trends maintains, does not meet expected performance threshold.

The new graphics updates according to Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) are expected to provide significant gaming performance improvements while also enhancing battery life of devices. A 30% improvement in performance especially on high-workload environments and a 10% improvement in gaming capabilities have been speculated as possible results of the upgrades.

Digital trend ran tests on the new upgrades on a 4th gen Intel Core i7-4500U processors and came out with some fascinating results of the purported upgrades impact. A-point of reference was established after running 3DMark Fire Strike and Cloud Gate before the new upgrades were installed in the system. During the test study, Digital Trends found out that when operating the laptop on the highest resolution of 1920×1280 only a small improvement could be achieved.

A score of 407 was achieved on 3DMark’s Fire Strike Test after installing the new drivers compared to the initial score of 405 without the new drivers. Operating the laptop on a lower resolution of 1366×768, on the other hand, proved to be ideal. The new drivers in this case sped up image rendering capability of the laptop while the screen redrew by a few percentage points.

Prior to installing the new drivers and at a screen resolution of 1368×768, a score of 782 was attained when 3DMark was ran. Installation of the new drivers only resulted in a 30 points improvement on the same test to record a score of 812. Cloud Gate study results also showed marginal improvement of the laptop performance from a score of 3,717 before the drivers were installed to 3,865 with the installation of the new drivers.

Contrary to Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s claims about the new drivers, it is clear that the new upgrades only cause marginal improvements in terms of graphics performance.