Flight Simulators and Open World/Sandbox Games Benchmarks
DirectX9 (and no anti-aliasing supported) Grand Theft Auto IV is our go-to title to determine he real capabilities of a new GPU. At higher resolutions the title is GPU bound, being able to exceed 1GB Video memory. It has also been known by the community for being harsh on systems due to the nature of its optimisations on the PC.
Since at max details, modern CPUs are not stressed by GTA4's built in benchmark and only record around 30% CPU use, we see no speedup on Haswell. However HD 4600 would not run the game despite whatever settings we chose.
GPU heavy Just Cause 2 is a similar story however the Intel iGPU is disappointing, not that integrated graphics was meant for such a workload, but we do need to establish a worst case scenario for comparing graphics technologies.
We replaced HAWX 2 with the free to play Warthunder in our test suite. The older GTX460 is quite capable in this game yet Intel is not. Note we simply chose the Max quality profile and did not customise this.
