Intel Tiger Lake Core i3 Fire Strike Graphics score indicates Gen12 Xe can finally offer some competition to AMD Vega iGPUs

With things finally starting to settle down after Intel's recent Comet Lake-H launch, it is time to look towards future offerings. Intel previewed the 10nm Tiger Lake-U platform back during CES 2020 and since then we have been seeing quite a few mentions of Tiger Lake pop-up on benchmarking sites.

Recently, references to what appears to be a Core i3 Tiger Lake-U were spotted on the 3DMark Fire Strike database by known leakster @_rogame. In this Fire Strike run, the purported 2C/4T Core i3 Tiger Lake processor running at 2.7 GHz scored 2,196 points. Looking at individual subsystem scores, this CPU has posted a Graphics score of 2,467, Physics score of 6,488, and a combined score of 720 points.

@_rogame notes that the Physics score seen here is half of the best Tiger Lake-U score seen so far (13,030 points) while the Graphics score is about 8% faster than the Ice Lake Core i5-1035G4 (2,285 points). 

In a similar comparison with another Ice Lake CPU, the Core i3-1005G1, we see there is a nearly 72% increase in the Graphics score, 1.6% increase in the Physics score, and an overall 62.4% increase in the total 3DMark score with the Core i3 Tiger Lake-U. All these observations seem to confirm that the Gen12 Xe iGPU in Tiger Lake is much more powerful compared to the Gen11 in Ice Lake.

Interestingly, Tiger Lake could also come closer than ever before to match AMD's iGPU prowess. We do not have scores from a Ryzen 3 4300U APU for comparison at the moment, but the Tiger Lake Core i3 seems to be firmly in Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U territory at least in the Graphics part of the test. 

If these early scores are any indication, they seem to imply that Tiger Lake benefits most in the GPU side of things thanks to Gen12 Xe, but the CPU performance may not see that much of an uplift from Ice Lake. Again, do remember that these are still engineering samples, and Fire Strike Physics alone is not a true indicator of CPU differences between generations. Also, the reported clocks are most likely not accurate, so take them with a pinch of salt. 

Corrigendum: The earlier version of the article incorrectly indicated that Tiger Lake's iGPU was Xe DG1. It was supposed to read Gen12 Xe and has been corrected accordingly. Readers may kindly note.