Although Diablo III is not exactly a hardware hog, as was revealed earlier by Blizzard, it still packs a decent punch and looks pretty good thanks to some graphics improvements. Legitreviews.com decided to go with the current Diablo III fever and try out two notebook platforms that have been filling the news posts for a couple of months if not longer, AMD's Trinity and Intel's Ivy Bridge.

The choice of weaponry included an Asus N56V notebook equipped with Intel Core i7-3920XM Ivy Bridge and Intel HD Graphics 4000 and AMD's reference Trinity notebook running A10-4600M APU with Radeon HD 7660G graphics. When those first Trinity reviews went online we were quite surprised that Intel managed to draw close to AMD but we also did note that Trinity is a pretty good chip that will end up cheaper and generally perform better due to better GPU performance as plain CPU performance just simply is not enough.

The same thing happened when Legitreviews.com ran Diablo III. When pushed to render at 1920x1080, the difference was quite noticeable, as Trinity managed to pull forward with an average of 26.2 FPS versus the 17.7 average on Intel's Ivy Bridge platform. Although we would prefer if that average was at least over 30FPS, the 48 percent gain with Trinity is pretty impressive as it depends on whether you can get close to "playable framerates" or you are stuck way below it.

When set to run at lower 1280x720 resolution, AMD's platform managed to be around 40 percent faster with 47.6FPS versus 34.0FPS on Intel's platform. Of course, game ran pretty smoothly on both platforms but this shows that AMD is still quite ahead with integrated graphics performance.

You can check out the original post, game quality settings and benchmark results over at Legitreviews.com.