Don’t Expect Too Much From Intel’s DG1 Chip

If you were hoping that Intel’s foray into the graphics card market would blow away the competition and give consumers a solid third choice when it comes to graphics cards, it seems we might have to wait a bit longer.

Intel Xe Leak Gives Us An Idea of DG1’s Performance

Ever since the CES trade show, we’ve known deep down that Intel wouldn’t jump straight into the GPU market with dominating hardware. However, since then, the hopes that these cards would make for a decent budget option or even an improvement for laptop gaming are quickly dwindling.

A benchmark for a chip named “Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller” was spotted by Twitter user TUM_APISAK in the Geekbench benchmark database and the performance is far from flattering.

If this chip is indeed the Intel DG1 GPU, it scored an OpenCL performance of only 55,373. To put this in perspective, an Nvidia MX250 dGPU scores around the 48,000 mark and this is only a low-power chip.

In their more power-hungry lineup, Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Mobile dGPU scores upwards of 110,000 – pretty much doubling the performance seen in this leak. AMD, on the other hand, manages a score of around 65,000 with its RX 560 GPU while its RX 550 chip falls a little bit lower with a score of around 50,000.

Could This Performance Still Be Due To Change?

When looking at leaked figures it’s important to remember that this may not be representative of the final product. With this chip still being actively developed, we could see some definite improvements before its final release. Some other factors to consider are the fact that this is likely a development chip and the drivers it’s running on may not be the final version. This would mean its benchmark scores could vary.

Saying this, even if there is a performance boost on the final release, we still don’t expect it to be enough to compete with the ‘big two’ graphics card providers. We could see the likely release of DG1 be included alongside a Tiger Lake CPU which is already said to be equipped with a GPU with performance on par with AMD’s mobile processors.

This could be great for those who run lots of parallel tasks and it might even include some efficient power-sharing features. When it comes to gaming though, it looks like we still have a wait ahead of us before we see a dedicated Intel gaming GPU.

It’s important to take all leaks with a pinch of salt, any of the information we’ve looked at today could be subject to change or simply inaccurate. As always, we’ll aim to keep you updated with the latest tech news here at WePC, be sure to check back often!