Six months later, Iris Xe is looking to be exactly what Intel needed in its fight against AMD Ryzen

When we first benchmarked Iris Xe back in early October of 2020, we found a handful of game-specific bugs and crashes that ultimately made the Intel GPU less reliable than the classic GeForce MX alternative. Performance was also more unsteady in certain titles like GTA V or Apex Legends. Now that we are almost halfway through 2021, we have since tested dozens more Tiger Lake laptops running on updated drivers than our initial Tiger Lake unit back in 2020 was sorely missing. Intel has since directly addressed some problematic titles including Horizon Zero Dawn (as of v27.20.100.9466) to allow for gameplay at lower settings.

We're also starting to get a better idea of how Iris Xe compares to the current lineup of mobile Ryzen CPUs. On average, frame rates are comparable to the Radeon RX Vega 8 4000 which is currently the fastest integrated GPU on AMD's Zen 2 Ryzen 7 Lucienne platform. Other integrated Radeon RX Vega GPUs like the Vega 6, 9, or 10 are all consistently slower than Iris Xe by relatively wide margins. Using 3DMark to judge the performance differences between Iris Xe and Radeon RX Vega is not always reliable and so we've also included real-world gaming benchmarks below. Some titles, like Final Fantast XV, favor Iris Xe significantly.

As for the hyped Iris Xe Max, its gaming performance is not any better than the standard Iris Xe 96 EUs despite what its name may otherwise suggest. This particular version was designed more for content creation and editing instead of gaming as exemplified by the Dell Inspiron 7506 2-in-1.

In all, it's an impressive showing from Intel considering that they were an order of magnitude behind AMD in terms of integrated graphics performance just a couple of years of ago. Suddenly, Ultrabooks with GeForce MX graphics are looking less appealing and even less common at this point in time.