Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q

The Intel Xe Graphics G7 (Tiger-Lake U GPU with 96 EUs) is a integrated graphics card in the high end Tiger-Lake U CPUs (15 - 28 Watt). It is using the new Xe architecture (Gen12) and was introduced in September 2020. The GPU clocks with a base clock speed (guaranteed) of 400 MHz in all CPUs and can boost up to 1340 MHz (i7-1185G7). The slowest variant offers only 1100 MHz boost (i5-1130G7, 12 Watt TDP).

The performance depends on the TDP settings of the laptop and the used cooling. First informations show that the chip can be configured at 12 and 28 Watt TDP default (as the Ice Lake-U chips) and the performance should be around a dedicated GeForce MX350 in 3DMark benchmarks. For gaming we are expecting a bit worse performance due to the missing dedicated graphics memory and driver support. Many games e.g. had problems when testing the various laptops (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn or Cyberpunk 2077 did not start or were crashing - see list below). Less demanding games like the Mass Effect Legendary Edition ran in medium settings fine. Compared to the older Ice Lake Iris Plus G7 GPU, the new Tiger Lake GPU should be approximately twice as fast. Therefore, the iGPU is still only for lowest graphical settings and low resolutions in demanding games.

The Tiger Lake SoCs and therefore the integrated GPU are manufactured in the modern 10nm+ (10nm SuperFin) process (improved 10nm process) at Intel and therefore should offer a very good efficiency.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with Max-Q design is a mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1650 integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. Compared to the desktop version, the mobile and Max-Q versions use all 1024 shaders of the TU117 chip. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1650 for laptops (depending on the cooling capabilities). According to the specifications, the Max-Q variant clocks 20% slower for the base speed and 27% for the boost speed.

Beginning March 2020, the GTX 1650 Max-Q is also available with fast 4GB GDDR6 (N18P-G61).

The performance should be slightly faster than the old GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q. 

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Compared to the bigger Turing chips (like the TU116 of the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX lineup), the TU117 does not include the new NVENC encoder but an older one similar to the one used in Pascal and Volta.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 35 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) and therefore 15 Watts lower than a normal (Max-P) 1650 for laptops. Therefore, the Max-Q variant is well suited for thin and light laptops. The TU117 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.