Intel Xe in trouble: Leaked Intel DG1 Sisoft Sandra scores are 51 percent slower than the GTX 1050 Ti

Leaked SiSoft Sandra FP32 scores paint a sobering picture of progress on Intel's Xe architecture, amid rumors of corporate infighting. Scores for the Intel Xe DG1 platform were spotted recently. The DG1, which scored 1815 in the FP32 floating point performance test, is over 50 percent lower than the GTX 1050 Ti, a popular discrete Nvidia GPU found in a number of laptops.

Because games primarily utilize FP32 operations, FP32 performance is a proxy for actual performance in-game. In this case, the benchmarks suggest that the DG1 performs more or less in the vicinity of the GTX 650 Ti, a budget graphics card from 2013.

Put in the context of these scores, Intel's caginess at CES 2020--where it showed Destiny 2 gameplay on the DG1 but refused to reveal actual performance figures--makes sense. The DG1--and the Xe architecture might simply not be where Intel expect it to be at the moment. 

The Intel Xe DG1 is a 96 EU part. Scaling these numbers up, we can get an idea of how a 256 EU Xe HP consumer part might perform. It's not a pretty picture: a hypothetical 256 EU Xe part running at the same clocks as DG1 would be 30 percent slower than the GTX 980, a high-end GPU from six years ago.

GPUs based on Intel's Xe architecture are slated to launch this year, with Xe LP (Low Power) parts similar to the DG1 expected to arrive first, likely in the form of Tiger Lake Gen12 iGPUs.

 With Xe performance evidently in dire straights, uncertainty increases over Intel's plans for this year: Xe LP parts might offer "good enough" performance as Gen12 iGPUs, but Xe HP, as it stands now, doesn't appear to be competitive with modern cards from Nvidia or AMD.