Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs vs Intel UHD Graphics 730 (Rocket Lake) vs Intel Iris Plus Graphics G4 (Ice Lake 48 EU)

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 Intel Iris Plus Graphics G4(Ice Lake with 48 EUs) is an integrated graphics card in the Ice Lake SoCs (10th generation core 10xxG4) for laptops. It offers no dedicated graphics memory (no eDRAM cache like the Intel Iris Graphics 655 predecessor of the Coffee Lake SoCs). It offers 48 of the 64 EUs (Execution Units / Shader Blocks) of the Ice Lake chip and the clock rate depends on the processor model. At launch it looks like all models have a 300 MHz base clock and only differ in the boost clock (1050 - 1100 MHz). Another difference is the TDP as it can be configured from 12 - 25 Watt in the 15 Watt U-models and maybe even higher in the 25 Watt models that will come later.

The performance was not yet communicated, but due to the 25% less cores and similar clock speeds the performance should be clearly lower than the full Iris Plus G7 models. Although, the Ice Lake G4 graphics does not feature any dedicated graphics memory it should perform better than the old Iris Plus 655 with 128 MB eDRAM. Compared to AMDs offering, we suspect the performance should be similar to an AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU. Therefore, the gaming performance should be only sufficient for low demanding games like Rocket League or Overwatch.

A special new feature of the Gen11 graphics card is the new Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support. With it game designers can decide where to spend shading time and e.g. shade object in the background or behind fog with less resolution (up to using only one source for a 4x4 block). With this technique early results show up to 1.3x performance in Unreal Engine POC and 1.2x speedup in Civ 6. Up to now VRS is only supported by the new Nvidia Turing architecture (GTX 1650 and up).

Another improved hardware piece is the integrated video de- and encoder that was improved significantly according to Intel. They did not specify any more details, but the previous generation was able to decode VP9 and H.265/HEVC in Main10 profile with 10 bit color depth using the dedicated hardware.

The Iris Plus G4 supports three display pipes that can each output 5K60 signals (via DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3 or HDMI 2.0b). Combining two pipes, the chip is capable to output 8k content.

The Ice Lake SoCs and therefore the integrated GPU are manufactured in the modern 10nm+ process at Intel that should be comparable to the 7nm process of TSMC.