Exclusive | Updated: Intel Tiger Lake Gen12 Xe iGPU offers significantly better performance than Ice Lake Gen11 at same TDP, finally surpasses Vega 8 in AMD Renoir

We've seen several benchmarks of Tiger Lake's Gen12 Xe iGPU leak over the past few weeks. Now, we have exclusive 3DMark Fire Strike results comparing Ice Lake's Gen11 with Tiger Lake-U offerings and from what we gather, it looks like Intel seems to have finally made a viable competitor to AMD Radeon RX Vega iGPUs.

We get to know from our sources that Tiger Lake's Xe iGPU would sport 48, 80, and 96 Execution Units (EUs) with the 96-EU part also being available in a 28 W TDP envelope. The 3DMark Fire Strike results that we've received show that even the entry-level Core i3 Tiger Lake with 48 EUs is about 20% faster than the Ice Lake Iris Plus Graphics G7 with 64 EUs. The 15 W 96 EU Tiger Lake Core i7 offers nearly twice the performance of the Iris Plus Graphics G7 with the 28 W variant affording an additional ~15% increase. 

These numbers paint a very good picture for Intel at least on the iGPU side of things. Ice Lake's top-end Iris Plus Graphics G7 couldn't really hold up to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 in the Ryzen 7 4800U. Things are different now as the 15 W Tiger Lake Core i7 with 96 EUs is nearly 2x faster than Ice Lake Core i7 with 64 EUs and hence is well-poised to beat AMD at the iGPU game. These gains could be the result of not just having higher number of EUs but also possibly higher clocks and architectural improvements. 

While Intel's leads in iGPU scores come as a breath of fresh air, things still may not be rosy on the CPU side of things. We are not still sure of Tiger Lake's single-core numbers, but AMD Renoir will likely continue its hegemony in multi-core. We also do not yet know the kind of real-world gaming performance that can be expected from Gen12 Xe iGPUs, and it is likely that the performance gap in gaming might not be as high as they are in synthetics. Of course, a lot of this also depends on driver optimization as well.

Things should get clearer as we get closer to launch sometime in early H2 2020.

Update: Updated Graphics, 1x is UHD Graphics G1