Intel HD Graphics (Cherry Trail) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (Desktop) vs Intel HD Graphics 405 (Braswell)

Intel HD Graphics (Cherry Trail)

The Intel HD Graphics (Cherry Trail) is an integrated graphics card in the Cherry-Trail SoCs (e.g. Atom x7-Z8700). Based on a Broadwell GPU (Intel Gen8) and supports DirectX 11.2. Depending on the SoC offers 12 or 16 EUs.

Atom x7-Z8700: 16 EUs @ 200 - 600 MHz, dual-channel memory
Atom x5-Z8500: 12 EUs @ 200 - 600 MHz, dual-channel memory
Atom x5-Z8300: 12 EUs @ 200 - 500 MHz, single-channel memory

In Windows, gaming is limited to less demanding or quite old games. Using Android, even high end 3D games should run fluently. For example Team Fortress 2 was running on the Surface 3 (x7-Z8700) only in lowest settings and 1280x720 fluently (11 - 69 fps range).

The integrated video decoder is able to display even 4K videos (H.264 tested) fluently.

The Intel HD Graphics GPU in our review sample of the MS Surface 3 (Atom x7-Z8700) only supported DisplayPort 1.1 as it seems, as 4K (3840x2160) with 30 Hz was the maximum Refresh Rate we could achieve (no 60 Hz selectable with the pre-installed drivers).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is the second fastest Pascal based graphics card in November 2017. It is a high-end desktop graphics card based on a cut down GP104 chip as the GTX 1080 and manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC. Compared to the GTX 1080, it uses the more available GDDR5 graphics memory, and compared to the GTX 1070 it offers more shaders (2432 versus 1920). More details on the Pascal architecture including all features and comparisons to Maxwell, can be found here.

The performance of the GTX 1070 Ti was in our tests right between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. However, the powerefficiency was worse than the GTX 1070 and near the GTX 1080. Nvidia also specifies the 1070 Ti and 1080 at 180W.

Intel HD Graphics 405 (Braswell)

The Intel HD Graphics 405 (Braswell)  is an integrated graphics card in the low end SoCs of the Braswell series (e.g. Pentium N3710). It is based on the same architecture as the integrated GPU of the Broadwell graphics cards (e.g. HD Graphics 5300), but offers less shader cores and slower clock speeds.

The GPU was simply called Intel HD Graphics (Broadwell) before 2016 and included also the slower 12 EUs version in the Celeron model. The Graphics 405 name currently only stands for 16-core-versions in Pentium models. The 12 EU version is now called Intel HD Graphics 400.

The clock speed and memory configuration can still vary from model to model.

Gaming performance ist still only suited for older or less demanding games. Often also the processor is limited gaming performance (e.g. in the dual-core N3000).

The SoC also integrates a video decoding engine that should be able to handle 4K H.265 videos.