Here’s some truly remarkable news: Intel’s integrated graphics game has finally caught up with the big boys. The folks over at Notebookcheck benchmarked the Lenovo C940. This model features 11th-gen Iris Plus integrated graphics. The Iris Plus is one of the largest iGPUs we’ve seen, with 64 execution units. How well does it perform though?
Remarkably, the 11th gen Iris Plus seems to outdo the Vega 10, and sometimes by a substantial margin. Before we get to the figures, keep in mind that the Gen11 iGPU comes with the 10th Gen Intel Ice Lake CPUs, team blue’s first 10nm offering. Although limited to the laptop market as of yet, the server parts are expected to come in 2020 but there’s still no word on the desktop versions. We expect the Comet Lake-S CPUs featuring as many as 10 cores (again based on the 14nm Skylake Core) to succeed Intel’s 9th Gen lineup. Rather glaring when you think that AMD is prepping the Zen 3 based Ryzen 4000 chips for a 2020 launch.
Getting back to the topic at hand, in 3DMark Firestrike, the Iris Plus is nearly 25 percent ahead of Vega 10. Notebookcheck also ran some real-world gaming figures. While the outcomes aren’t as absurd, the Iris Plus still looks great. At Ultra settings, it was 2 percent faster than Vega 10 in Bioshock Infinite at 1080p, though neither GPU delivered what we’d call playable performance. Meanwhile, in XPlane, the
While the Iris Plus 11th gen is still very much an entry-level graphics solution, it’s a very important product before the discrete GPU, Intel Xe hits the market next year. We have no idea how Xe will perform. But if Intel’s already getting competitive in the iGPU space, we might just we be seeing the first real challenger to the Nvidia/AMD duo since the 1990s.
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