Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 (Ice Lake 64 EU) vs AMD Radeon RX Vega Mobile vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

The Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 (Ice Lake with 64 EUs) is an integrated graphics card in the Ice Lake SoCs (10th generation core 10xxG7) for laptops. It offers no dedicated graphics memory (no eDRAM cache like the Intel Iris Graphics 655 predecessor of the Coffee Lake SoCs). The clock rate depends on the processor model. At launch it looks like all models have a 300 MHz base clock and only differ in the boost clock (1050 - 1100 MHz). Another difference is the TDP as it can be configured from 12 - 25 Watt in the 15 Watt U-models and maybe even higher in the 25 Watt models that will come later.

The performance should be slightly above a AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 integrated GPU in the Ryzen 7 3000 series processors. e.g. Intel showed a Intel Iris Plus G7 against a Ryzen 7 3700U both configured at 25 Watt TDP and the Ice Lake GPU was able to beat the Vega 10 slightly in all games. Compared to the previous generation, Intel talks about a 2x performance improvement but wont specify the exact model. All in all the GPU should be positioned in the entry level of dedicated GPUs (Nvidia GeForce MX150 level?) and therefore most suited for less demanding games like Fortnite, Rainbow 6 Siege, or Rocket League at reduced details. The theoretical performance of the Chip is specified with 1.12 TFLOPS (FP32) and 2.25 TFLOPS (FP16) when running at 1.1 GHz.

Compared to the older Gen.9 graphics (e.g., UHD Graphics 620 in Whiskey Lake), Gen.11 is using a wider architecture and also has 3 MB dedicated L3 cache near the GPU.

A special new feature of the Gen11 graphics card is the new Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support. With it game designers can decide where to spend shading time and e.g. shade object in the background or behind fog with less resolution (up to using only one source for a 4x4 block). With this technique early results show up to 1.3x performance in Unreal Engine POC and 1.2x speedup in Civ 6. Up to now VRS is only supported by the new Nvidia Turing architecture (GTX 1650 and up).

Another improved hardware piece is the integrated video de- and encoder that was improved significantly according to Intel. They did not specify any more details, but the previous generation was able to decode VP9 and H.265/HEVC in Main10 profile with 10 bit color depth using the dedicated hardware.

The Iris Plus G7 supports three display pipes that can each output 5K60 signals (via DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3 or HDMI 2.0b). Combining two pipes, the chip is capable to output 8k content.

The Ice Lake SoCs and therefore the integrated GPU are manufactured in the modern 10nm process at Intel that should be comparable to the 7nm process of TSMC.

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 is a high-end desktop GPU that was first introduced in August of 2017. It is based on the Vega architecture (Vega 10) and equipped with fast HBM2 VRAM. When it was first introduced, it was the second fastest AMD GPU available, only bested by the RX Vega 64 that launched on the very same day. At the time of writing, both GPUs have been replaced by their respective Radeon VII successors.

The RX Vega 56 reference design features 56 CUs running at 1,138-1,474 MHz (Boost) and 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM running at 800 MHz connected via a 2,048-bit memory bus resulting in a memory bandwidth of 409.6 GB/s.

Features

Vega 10 is still produced in a 10-nm manufacturing process. The die consists of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and measures 495 mm2 in size. The newer Vega 20 chip, which AMD’s current Radeon VII is based on, features around 13.2 billion transistors. Applications have access to a total of 3,584 shaders, but the GPU lacks the dedicated Raytracing and Tensor cores that can be found on Nvidia’s latest RTX generation of GPUs.

Performance

Performance-wise, the RX Vega 56 is comparable to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, and thus best categorized as upper middle-class. Games released in 2018 and 2019 should run perfectly fine and smooth in high details on WQHD (2560 x 1440).

Power Consumption

According to AMD, the RX Vega 56’s maximum power consumption is 210 W. Given the GTX 1070’s power consumption of just 150 W, the Vega 56 cannot keep up with its direct competitor in regards to performance-per-watt ratio.