And even then, I wouldn't want to play this fairly mainstream game on the Radeon HD 4200, either. Drop to Low quality settings, though, and the 785G takes off ahead. Intel can put a feather in its cap for besting AMD's 785G-based Radeon HD 4200 graphics core across the board in World of Warcraft with Ultra settings enabled.
But in order to do so, you’ll need to drop your resolution and detail settings so far as to make the game not enjoyable. Yes, you can play World of Warcraft on a Clarkdale-based processor (specifically, the Core i5-661-the only model with a 900 MHz graphics clock). Yes, the HD Graphics implementation is significantly better than anything Intel has offered in the past. The Intel Extreme Graphics parts that preceded the GMA parts had Hardware TnL and often outperformed GMA parts even 2 generations later. World of Warcraft, Dalaran Circuit, 60 Seconds (FRAPS) If I were paranoid I would suspect that Intel has white-washed their past product from our collective memory. Just how significant of an improvement is HD Graphics over the GMA X4500HD? We set both platforms up in World of Warcraft and ran circuits around Dalaran for 60 seconds at a time with the aim of finding out. Intel makes up to 1.7GB of system memory available to graphics, as with its previous-generation integrated graphics core, but there’s really no reason to dedicate that much RAM in light of the GPU’s performance characteristics. Performance is further improved by Hierarchical Z and Fast Z Clear-two components originally featured in ATI’s HyperZ suite, designed to maximize the use of available memory bandwidth and prevent unnecessary overdraw on Radeon GPUs back in 2000. The gain should also be palpable in the real world, as lower latencies enable higher utilization of available throughput, which you’ll see in our synthetic memory bandwidth numbers.
Of course, the on-package graphics core with its on-die memory controller promises a substantial boost to memory bandwidth-and not only in theory (from two channels of DDR3-1066 serving up to 17 GB/s to two channels of DDR3-1333 pushing up to 21 GBs).