Intel says the Iris Xe Max isn't really for gaming. They're not wrong

The Intel Xe family of GPUs is the company's bold attempt at going head-to-head with the all-popular Nvidia graphics cards. Making something competitive against the GeForce RTX 3080 isn't going to happen overnight, of course, and so Intel has elected to start from the ground up by launching integrated Iris Xe solutions first before eventually making available discrete options. The first laptops with integrated Xe launched late last year while the discrete Xe Max is now finally available on store shelves albeit in limited quantities.

The first two laptops sporting the Xe Max GPU that users can buy right now are the Asus VivoBook Flip 15 TP470 and Dell Inspiron 15 7506 2-in-1 Black Edition. Driver issues were teeming when we initially got our hands on the Dell convertible, but Intel eventually addressed many of these concerns with driver updates (version 27.20.100.9039 at the time of writing). The Xe Max is no traditional discrete GPU, however, as Intel has designed it specifically for video encoding and graphics editing rather than raw gaming prowess.

Does this mean that the Xe Max can't play games at all? Though it can certainly run some titles faster than the GeForce MX350 based on our experience with the Dell convertible, other titles may run significantly slower. For example, both DOTA 2 and GTA V would each run almost 50 percent slower than the GeForce MX350 to be just marginally better than the integrated Xe 96 EUs. The GPU isn't optimized for many games and the results definitely show.

Even worse is the fact that the Dell Inspiron 15 7506 2-in-1 Black Edition retails for well over $1000 USD. When considering that a standard laptop with faster GeForce GTX 1650 or GTX 1660 Ti graphics costs about the same, the Xe Max would need to come down in price significantly to be more worthwhile.

Intel is rumored to be working on a DG2 series of desktop graphics card that can better rival the cards from AMD and Nvidia. We'll just have to wait and see if the DG2 drivers will be better optimized for games or if we'll be getting a repeat of the Xe Max.