Intel UHD Graphics Xe G4 48EUs vs NVIDIA T1200 Laptop GPU

The Intel UHD Graphics Xe Graphics G4 (Tiger-Lake U GPU with 48 EUs) is a integrated graphics card in the low end Tiger-Lake U CPUs (15 Watt, e.g. Core i3 11th Gen). It is using the new Xe architecture (Gen12) and should be announced later in 2020.

The performance depends on the TDP settings of the laptop and the used cooling. First informations show that the chip can be configured at 15 and 28 Watt TDP default (as the Ice Lake-U chips) and the performance should be around a dedicated GeForce MX230 in 3DMark benchmarks. For gaming we are expecting a bit worse performance due to the missing dedicated graphics memory and driver support. Compared to the fastest Ice Lake iGPU (Iris Plus G7), the 48 EU version in an i3 should be slightly faster. 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+ process (improved 10nm process) at Intel and therefore should offer a very good efficiency.

The Nvidia T1200 Laptop GPU (or Quadro T1200 for laptops) is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). Compared to the consumer GTX 1650 Ti, the T1200 features more CUDA cores / shaders (1024 versus 896). The Quadro T2000 uses the same TU117 chip, but features all 1024 cores (2x to the T1000) and is therefore significantly faster. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. The T1200 was introduced as a refresh to the Quadro T1000 together with the new Ampere RTX A workstation cards like the faster Nvidia RTX A2000.

It is available in different variants from 35 - 95 Watt (TGP) with different clock speeds (and performance). The GPU supports DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 for external connections.

There is no more Max-Q variant (formerly used for the low power variants) but every OEM can choose to implement Max-Q 3.0 technologies (Dynamic Boost, WhisperMode).

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 up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T1000 and T2000 do not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.

When configured as a slow 35W variant, the T1200 is also suited for thin and light laptops.