Intel (Xe) DG1 Benchmarked – Slower than RX 560/1050 Ti

With the release of the Intel Tiger Lake-S processor range expected before the end of this year, the series should mark the debut of their integrated ‘Xe’ graphics platform.

With ‘discreet’ engineering samples already out there, however, it seems that in a report via Videocardz, a benchmark taken from one of them has leaked online and, in terms of comparative performance, the current design doesn’t (yet) even have the beating of an AMD RX 560 or Nvidia 1050 Ti.

Intel ‘Xe’ DG1

On the whole, the benchmarks released do not look overly impressive. There are, however, factors surrounding this graphics card that some people may not be aware of. Chief among these is the fact that this isn’t really a discrete graphics card. It is, instead, a physical version of the integrated APU graphics adaptor that will be used in Tiger Lake-S.

In other words, this will very likely not represent an individual consumer-level release and is certainly not indicative of what level of performance can be expected when Intel does finally launch its first official gaming GPUs (all going well) later this year! It does, however, give us a fairly solid idea as to (at the time of writing) just where Intel currently is with this APU design.

What Do We Think?

There is still around 3-5 months (depending on your sources) to go before Intel launches their Tiger Lake-S platform and, as such, this graphics adaptor clearly still has plenty of time to improve. When you consider though that it’s nearly already on par with what you would politely call ‘entry-level’ gaming graphics cards, it actually makes this seem like a much more interesting proposition.

So, the short version is that it’s not fantastic. As an integrated graphics adaptor, however, I’m sure you didn’t expect that, right? Better still though, there is still plenty of time for this to get a lot better!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!