Intel Iris Xe Max-powered Asus VivoBook Flip 14 TP470 in review: Good gains over Xe Graphics G7 96 EUs, MX350, and GTX 1050 in synthetic GPU tests

For this comparison, we have pitted the Xe Max-powered VivoBook TP470 primarily against laptops powered by the GeForce MX350, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Max-Q, GTX 1050 Ti, Xe Graphics G7 80 EUs, and Xe Graphics G7 96 EUs along with the AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 and RX 5300M. We have also included results from an MX450-powered pre-sample device for perspective, but we advice taking that data with some caution.

Right off the bat, we see that Xe Max comes very close to the GTX 1050 Ti in 3DMark 11 and is only 8% slower than the MX450 numbers we have in our database. Compared to Tiger Lake Xe Graphics G7 with 96 EUs, we see Xe Max showing up to a 23% lead in this benchmark.

Though Xe G7 96 EUs and Xe Max are somewhat identical GPUs, the latter is clocked 300 MHz higher and comes with its own memory controller with a 68 GB/s bandwidth, which explains the higher scores. When compared to an 80 EU-Xe G7, we get to see a 37% boost in performance with Xe Max. The Radeon Vega 8 in the Ryzen 7 4800U trails by 26% in this test. Gains up to 34% can be expected against an MX350 GPU.

Xe Max also does well in our suite of 3DMark GPU tests. In Time Spy, Xe Max is 4% ahead of our MX450 numbers while being 27% faster than the MX350. However, the performance gap between Xe G7 96 EUs in the Schenker Vision 15 and Xe Max narrows significantly in this benchmark with the latter leading by only 9%.

Interestingly, the Xe G7 96 EUs in the Dell XPS 13 9310 with a Core i7-1165G7 shows trails our Xe Max-powered VivoBook TP470 by 31%. This can probably be explained by the large disparity in PL1/PL2 values between these laptops. Xe Max shows nearly 50% higher scores in comparison with a Renoir Vega 8 while itself being 51% slower than the RX 5300M.

In Fire Strike, both the MX450 and GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q lead the Xe Max by a decent margin though the Xe Max is still about 6% faster than a GTX 1050. The power disparity between the Schenker Vision 15 and Dell XPS 13 9310 comes into play again in this test; the Xe Max is about 10% faster than the Xe G7 96 EUs in the Schenker.

Xe Max seems to offer a significant 46% lead over the MX350 and about 61% higher performance than a Renoir Vega 8 in Fire Strike.

Unigine Valley at the FHD Extreme Preset shows that the Xe Max is lagging by 4% compared to the MX350 but and that gap grows to 39% when compared with he GTX 1050 Max-Q.

Preliminary evaluation seems to suggest that Intel Xe Max could prove to be a viable alternative to the NVIDIA GeForce MX350 and the Renoir Vega 8 in synthetic benchmarks. We also see good gains over the GTX 1050 series. Pre-sample MX450 numbers indicate that Intel still has some work to do.

That being said, do note that performance in games can be vastly different owing to differences between various game engines. We look forward to doing game benches on our Asus VivoBook TP470 sample very soon.

Own