Leaked Intel Xe DG1 Geekbench 4 OpenCL score shows it trailing behind the Vega 11 in the Ryzen 5 3400G; retail units will not ship as PCIe add-on cards

Even since Intel started supplying the Xe DG1 dGPU as a Software Development Vehicle (SDV) to select Independent System Vendors (ISVs), we have been seeing the GPU show up on several benchmarks. The Xe DG1's OpenCL score was spotted on Geekbench 5 before and now the same GPU has popped on Geekbench 4 as well.

First spotted by @TUM_APISAK, the Geekbench 4 listing shows the Xe DG1 as having 96 Compute Units (CUs), a 1.5 GHz clock, and 3 GB VRAM. The GPU is being identified as an Intel Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller. The Xe DG1 was tested in a PC powered by the Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700 CPU and 16 GB RAM running Windows 10 Enterprise. 

According to the Geekbench 4 OpenCL entry, the Xe DG1 scored 55,373 points. For comparison, an RX Vega 11 running at 1.75 GHz in the Ryzen 5 3400G APU is about 5% faster with a score of 58,152. Xe DG1 can still be considered competitive with the Vega 11, especially when when taking into account that stock Vega 11 is clocked only at 1,240 MHz. 

Videocardz put up a comparison of Compubench and Geekbench OpenCL scores between the Xe DG1 and other entry-level contenders such as the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650. Not surprisingly, the Xe DG1 trails behind both these GPUs significantly. Though not necessarily a fair comparison, it does serve to indicate how well the DG1 would stack up when compared to the competition in the entry-level segment. That being said, the drivers for Xe DG1 are unlikely to be final at this point in time and as such this comparison should only be considered preliminary.

Although the Xe DG1 SDV is shipped as a PCIe card for ISVs, this will not be the case during retail availability. According to a presentation by the Argonne National Laboratory, which employs the Xe high power (HP) Ponte Vecchio compute processors, Xe DG1 is a low power (LP) part that will be used in laptops with the GPU directly integrated on the motherboard. There will be no standalone PCIe form factor retail units.

Xe will also be integrated into upcoming Intel Tiger Lake Core processors, which should allow for much improved graphics and decent gaming performance for ultrabooks and laptops without having to reach out for an entry-level dGPU such as the NVIDIA MX300 series. Having said that, NVIDIA is known to be prepping a Turing-based successor to the MX350 that offers GTX 1650-level performance. It will be interesting to see how these entry-level GPUs pan-out in the months to come.