Today, Intel fed us a feast of information around its 11th generation Core “Tiger Lake” processors, enough to sustain us for days to come. But among the most appetizing tidbits were details surrounding its new Iris Xe integrated graphics.
What Is Iris Xe?
To start, Iris Xe is the name for the new integrated graphics that will be built into the upper tier of the company's 11th generation laptop chips. Intel introduced nine new CPUs in this first wave of Tiger Lake silicon, and Iris Xe will be included in the Core i5 and i7 processors in this new fleet. CPUs like the peak-model Core i7-1185G7 and the midfield Core i5-1135G7 will get it, as you can see in this summary of the new chips:
The Tiger Lake Core i3 processors, meanwhile, will stick with Intel UHD Graphics. (We're focusing here on the graphics performance, so for a wider overview of the processor announcements and details, check out our general Tiger Lake coverage.)
The exciting parts of the Iris Xe announcements are the lofty claims Intel made about the 3D performance levels, stating that these chips will roughly double the graphics performance of the previous generation. If true, this represents a major improvement in what integrated graphics are capable of for gaming in thin-and-light and general-use laptops.
Let's Go to the Inevitable Bar Charts...
For starters, the table below shows Intel's claims for the 3D performance of the Core i7-1185G7 and its Iris Xe graphics across a variety of titles in 1080p:
As you can see, while Iris Xe is still short of 60 frames per second (fps) in the demanding AAA games, less-strenuous games (particularly, competitive multiplayer titles) achieve very realistically playable frame rates. These are not running at maximum visual settings (Intel noted that "medium" settings were the norm elsewhere in its demonstration), but they are certainly representative of real, popular games running at full HD (1,920 by 1,080, aka 1080p).
Then there's the less-demanding games at the right of the chart, which nonetheless have huge audiences. If gamers can play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or League of Legends at more than 100fps on their thin-and-light everyday laptops, it’s a literal game-changing improvement. We’ll have to confirm the 3D performance ourselves, of course, when we get our hands on some Tiger Lake-based laptops with Iris Xe for benchmark testing.
If the numbers prove true, though, these gains stand to be a huge boon to those who don’t have, or can’t afford, a bona fide gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU, providing access on mainstream laptops to some of the most popular games around. This potentially allows the player base of a game like Valorant, with its generally low-fidelity and less-than-demanding visuals, to grow even further as a significant new chunk of the market is suddenly able to play at 60fps or greater.
The Iris Xe silicon is built into the processor. But some premium laptops of the kind we'd expect to see these Iris Xe-equipped chips in today employ low-end dedicated graphics chips such as Nvidia's GeForce MX to amp up the graphics muscle a little. That's what makes this second bar chart so audacious: Iris Xe can supposedly reach similar or better performance than Nvidia’s GeForce MX350 GPU. This is a low-end discrete GPU, to be sure, but in our tests the GeForce MX line has typically been markedly superior to integrated graphics in the past. You can see the specific frame-rate results in the table below.
Not every game is a win for Iris Xe, but the two contenders win some and lose some. That is impressive, considering one is current discrete graphics and one isn't.
The other head-to-head comparison that Intel offered was to the integrated Radeon graphics of a key rival mobile CPU from AMD. The below chart provides a head-to-head graphics comparison of the integrated graphics of AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U and Intel’s Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake processor with the new Iris Xe graphics, again across a variety of titles.
Intel also claims superior performance over Ryzen while streaming your gameplay as you play through a demo. This is tougher to test, but a video demonstration claimed roughly twice the frame rates while streaming through OBS, playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and using Discord on thin-and-light laptops. That said, it's not likely there's a huge audience for people interested in game streaming who don't have, or plan to have, a gaming laptop or desktop with a discrete GPU. But if it brings new players into the fold who only have access to a Tiger Lake system when the time comes, that's a win.
A New, Starring Role for Integrated Graphics?
Throughout its presentations extolling both the overall performance and the gaming prowess of its new Tiger Lake chips, Intel stressed that cores and threads are not the only way to measure a processor’s effectiveness. This is a favorable argument for the chip maker to make, as AMD has taken the spotlight in mobile-processor core and thread count (as well as overall performance with CPU-intensive muscle tasks). But the gaming gains, plus some claimed passive AI benefits, give Intel some real ground to stand on.
Based on this preview, Iris Xe looks like the first concrete step in the processor giant's long-touted plan to make a splash in the GPU space. The Xe project is slated to go down multiple paths, and we’ll see if the chip giant moves into discrete mobile GPUs in the future. But for now, the possibility of capable 1080p gaming performance in mass-market laptops could be a huge development.
We’ll report back with benchmark results for Iris Xe-bearing laptops as soon as we get our hands on the first samples for review later this year. But one thing's for sure right now: We're excited to see what they can do.
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