Onboard VGA Performance
Well, it's been a while with Intel sticking with basically the same integrated graphics with their CPUs so seeing the 11th Gen CPUs get a GPU upgrade was a little bit of a surprise. Intel has been working towards dedicated graphics, but I didn’t think we would see any changes on the integrated front unless the manufacturing process shrunk or if Intel increased the CPU size. Neither of those happened but they now have Iris Xe UHD 750 Graphics. The Xe 750 integrated GPU was used on the notebook side so it isn’t completely new but let's take a look at the performance.
My first test was using the older Cinebench R15 which has an OpenGL test. These results are the FPS at which the video is rendered and I was most curious how the new graphics would compare to even the older 2400G from AMD which has been better than Intel’s older 630 graphics for a long time now. The 11900K did well here but did still come in behind the dated 2400G. The 11600K however really fell behind here and I saw this same result multiple times.
Next, I defaulted to the always consistent 3DMark with both the older Fire Strike benchmark and the newer Time Spy which is DX12. Both I only used the graphics score, not the total score to take the CPU performance out of the equation as much as possible. In both, you can see a clean line between the older Intel CPUs and the two 11th Gen CPUs with the Xe 750 graphics but both of the older Ryzen CPUs were still out ahead which have Vega 11 graphics.
In Unigine Superposition I ran the 1080p medium detail and 720p low detail tests and the results were consistent with the 11900K and 11600K both coming in right with each other out ahead of the older Intel CPUs but behind the two AMD CPUs.
Then from there on, I jumped into game tests. Some of our tests are older games but I did also add in a few newer games as well to get an idea of newer games when tested at 1080p and low or medium settings. I was happy to see that Intel is finally in the 60+ FPS range for games like TF2 which also translates to reaching smooth playability with a lot of the “esport” titles. The higher-end games from a few years ago are playable but the newer games are rough still down in the 15 FPS range. Like in the synthetic results AMD is still out ahead here but it is good to see that Intel has made improvements over what had been used for the last 5/6 generations.
