A new review of Intel's Iris Xe DG1 graphics card has popped up, putting Intel's new discrete GPU through its paces and showing that it is surprisingly capable. While the Xe DG1 is far from being one of the best graphics cards on the market, the review shows that the entry-level graphics card holds some value in a time where the graphics card shortage is still going strong and pricing for Nvidia and AMD GPUs has skyrocketed.
Based on a cut-down Iris Xe Max silicon, the DG1 arrives with just 80 execution units (EUs) or 640 shading units, depending on which metric you prefer. Intel's discrete graphics card sports a 1.2 GHz base clock and a boost clock that climbs to 1.5 GHz. The DG1 also wields 4GB of LPDDR4X-4266 memory across a 128-bit interface. It conforms to a 30W TDP, so the graphics card doesn't require active cooling or PCIe power connectors. The DG1 provides one DisplayPort output, one HDMI port, and one DVI-D port for connecting your displays.
A previous generic benchmark revealed that the DG1 was slower than Radeon RX 550, a four-year-old graphics card. However, a single benchmark wasn't sufficient to really determine a winner, and as we all know, there's nothing like real-world gaming results. YouTuber ETA PRIME recently acquired a $749.99 CyberPowerPC gaming system that leverages the DG1, more specifically, the Asus DG1-4G. He has put the graphics card through its paces so we can see what kind of performance it brings to the table. We've got the quick breakdown of results in the table below, and the full video at the end of the article.
Intel Iris Xe DG1 Benchmarks
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Game
Resolution
Graphics Preset
Frame Rate (FPS)
Forza Horizon 4
1080p
Low
60 - 70
Injustice 2
1080p
Low
59 - 60
Overwatch
1080p
Medium
65 - 99
Fortnite
1080p
Performance Mode
106 - 262
Genshin Impact
1080p
Medium
57 - 60
Rocket League
1080p
High
82 -120
Grand Theft Auto V
1080p
Normal
79 - 92
Cyberpunk 2077
720p
Low
25 - 33
Red Dead Redemption 2
900p
Low
32 - 47
The CyberPowerPC system features a Core i5-11400F processor, which explains the DG1's presence. The curious part here is that Intel had previously stated that the DG1 is only compatible with its 9th-Gen Coffee Lake and 10th-Gen Comet Lake processors. The Core i5-11400F is an 11th-Gen Rocket Lake chip. It would appear that the chipmaker secretly added Rocket Lake support on the DG1.
Do bear in mind that the YouTuber swapped out the 8GB single stick of DDR4-3000 memory for a dual-channel 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3600 memory kit. The upgrade likely improves the gaming PC's performance over the stock configuration.
The results showed that the DG1 could deliver more than 60 FPS at 1080p (1920 x 1080) with a low graphics preset. Only a few titles, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, gave the DG1 a hard time. However, the graphics card still pushed more than 30 FPS most of the time.
As we knew from Intel's DG1 announcement, the entry-level market was DG1's objective all along. The graphics card's 1080p performance is more than reasonable if you can live without all the fancy eye candy in your life. If not, you should probably pass on the DG1. It would be interesting to see whether the DG1 can hold its own against one of AMD's latest Ryzen APUs. Unfortunately, that's a fight for another day.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
considering the horrendous driver issues reviewers are having with the intel gpus; to the point several can't even review them, i'd say intel has a long way to go on the software side of things before we can call them competitive at any level.
Performance appears to be a bit below the level of cards like the GT 1050 and RX 560, which were priced not much higher when they came out 4-5 years ago, so $99 would be kind of a poor price for that level of performance today, at least when ignoring the current card shortages at retail. If you are willing to pay that kind of money for that level of performance, you could have done so several years ago. And it was possible to find RX 570 cards with around double the performance for just a little more for a while there, provided one had a reasonably capable power supply to run one.
cryoburner, +1 it's nice they're trying to compete, but the timing makes it look like a cash grab. Realistically (without the gpu supply/demand crisis) this card is worth $10-30, as you're essentially buying a 5700g igpu or rx 560 (but not really built as a proper gpu to compare against it) and rx560 is a 4 year card, so it's worth $30.
cryoburner, +1 it's nice they're trying to compete, but the timing makes it look like a cash grab. Realistically (without the gpu supply/demand crisis) this card is worth $10-30, as you're essentially buying a 5700g igpu or rx 560 (but not really built as a proper gpu to compare against it) and rx560 is a 4 year card, so it's worth $30.
For a pure gamer...
This card includes hardware encoding which could be "priceless" , an elgato card that does nothing more than this card would do is several hundred $.
It also has hardware AI that could also be worth a lot to someone that can use it.
And nobody reviewed this card based on compute workloads, not that it would be great for compute but it would still be interesting to see if it would be worth it for some workloads.
