Tiger Lake Iris Xe G7 and GeForce MX350 are neck-to-neck in 3DMark — so why is the Intel chip still so much slower when gaming?

We've just finished testing a small handful of Intel Evo Ultrabooks equipped with the 11th gen Core i7-1165G7 CPU and integrated Iris Xe G7 graphics. This GPU in particular has been touted as being an alternative to the popular GeForce MX series and 3DMark results certainly suggest so with scores that are neck-to-neck between the two. When running actual games, however, the Nvidia GPU will still almost always outperform Intel's new fancy chip by as much as 80 percent in some titles despite what 3DMark is telling us as shown by the comparison charts below.

Games we've tested that run faster on the GeForce MX350 than the Iris Xe G7 include the following:

• GTA V
• DOTA 2
• X-Plane
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Assassin's Creed Odyssey
• The Division 2
• Borderlands 3
• Far Cry New Dawn
• Anno 1800
• Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

We have a few theories on why this might be happening. The first is poorer driver optimization from Intel when compared to the more mature drivers from Nvidia. The few Tiger Lake systems we benchmarked were running on pre-release graphics drivers that will surely be updated once they hit retail. It's unlikely that driver updates will close the frame rate gap significantly, but they will at least alleviate some of the issues we experienced.

Our second theory is that Intel might have focused on optimizing its graphics drivers specifically for 3DMark because most tech outlets use 3DMark as a standard of sorts. This may be considered borderline cheating, but we've mentioned in the past that 3DMark can be a poor tool anyway for comparing GPUs of different families such as the Iris Xe G7 to the GeForce MX350. Instead, the tool is at its best when comparing GPUs within the same family (i.e., Intel Iris to Iris or Nvidia GeForce to GeForce).

Our last theory involves the shared TDP pool with the CPU and the lack of VRAM. Unlike the discrete GeForce MX350, the integrated Iris Xe G7 must share resources with the CPU under the same 15 W to 28 W power envelope. This power balance is much more delicate as a stressed CPU will mean fewer resources for the GPU and vice versa. Meanwhile, the shared system RAM may save on motherboard space and overall power consumption, but it will never be as ideal as a pool of dedicated VRAM for gaming.

We still have to test more Tiger Lake Iris Xe G7 laptops before jumping to more conclusions. So far, however, users with GeForce MX laptops shouldn't feel like they're missing out very much performance-wise by skipping 11th gen Tiger Lake-U.