Intel Xe DG1 discrete GPU performance results versus upcoming iGPUs leak on 3DMark

This year, the competition in the discrete gaming GPU market is about to heat up, as Intel is preparing to take on the green and red teams. There will not be any high-end solutions at first, so we are only expecting entry-level solutions, possibly a mid-range  towards the end of 2020. Another important thing to note is that Intel will use the same Xe architecture for iGPUs and dGPU. This should provide quite a significant performance boost over previous iGPU models, and we have already caught a glimpse on how well these can perform with some Geekbench leaks last week.

But what about the discrete GPUs? The only tests we could find are some 3DMark dGPU comparisons to AMD’s 7 nm Vega iGPU from the upcoming Ryzen 4000 APUs plus the Tiger Lake laptop CPUs expected to launch soon. Not exactly a fair comparison, but we can get  a decent idea of what to expect from these chips.

The 3DMark results were spotted by _rogame and they compare a discrete DG1 GPU coupled with an i5-9600K CPU to the upcoming Ryzen 7 4800U and 4700U APUs that integrate 7 nm Vega GPUs, plus a Tiger Lake notebook CPU with a Xe iGPU. As far as the Graphics tests go, the Xe dGPU is clearly faster by as much as 40% than the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U, but for the overall results combining graphics and physics, the AMD chip is still faster, which is telling us that Intel might leave the physics acceleration for mid-range and high-end dGPUs. Additionally, there is one graphics test involving volumetric lights and shadows where the dGPU has the lowest scores of the pack. This could be due to a lack of optimization at these early stages, as we are still looking at a prototype sample.

Judging by the preliminary performance numbers, the DG1 cards could end up with a price tag a little over US$100, which should make it a decent alternative over the GTX 1650.