This is the new and powerful graphics for Intel Gen11 Ice Lake processors

Robert Sole 28 May 2019

1 907 2 reading minutes

A lot of detail has been given regarding Intel's Gen11 graphics, which will be integrated into Ice Lake processors and offer a huge leap in performance.

The signing of Raja Koduri by Intelpossibly the most talked about in the industry to date. The former director of the AMD Radeon division ended up leaving due to the pressures suffered with Vega and the important cut for development. It seems that it is already leaving its mark on Intel and the new graphics for its new processors. Gen11 iGPUs are a major leap from the current Gen9. These new graphics should offer 1.12TFLOPS of power and be Intel's first decent iGPU.

This is Gen11, the iGPUs for Ice Lake processors

The new Gen11 graphics feature a total of 64EU maximum operating at a maximum frequency of 1.1GHz. This new graphics card will offer us a computing power of 1.12TFLOPS. In addition, these new graphs will offer us an FP16 calculation of 2.25FLOPS, something important for Artificial Intelligence.

To put it in perspective, the graphics of the Xbox One offers us a graphics power of 1.3TFLOPS. It would compete with the NVIDIA MX 110, MX 130 and MX 150 low-power graphics, which are dedicated and increase costs and consumption. The MX 110 offers 0.51TFLOPS, the MX 130 offer 0.95TFLOPS and the MX 150 offer 1.17TFLOPS. This means that the Gen11 eliminates the need for dedicated NVIDIA graphics, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

The rasterizer that has 16 pixels per clock cycle is also improved. It offers us the possibility of processing 32 bilinear filtered textures per clock cycle. It is complemented by 3MB of dedicated L3 cache with 0.5MB of local memory shared by the raster. A more streamlined and improved architecture, without compromising energy efficiency. The Gen11 will also be the first to support the VESA adaptive sync standard.

Noticeable performance increase

That VESA Adaptive Sync is implemented is a great thing, as it minimizes and smooths image refreshment at low frame rates. All the improvements offer us a performance improvement of almost 1.8 times over the previous generation. These new Intel graphics have been called Iris Plus.

We see some performance benchmarks with respect to the HD 620 under 1080p resolutions. These graphics are not intended for advanced gaming, they are a solution for casual games. In most cases, the graphic quality is medium or low at 1080p resolutions. To play at 1080p @ 30FPS, the graphic quality in most cases is medium and if we want more, like playing at 1080 @ 30FPS, we must reduce the graphic quality to a minimum.

Important standards have been added to power this new architecture. Among the improvements we find the hardware decoding acceleration of HEVC up to 8K UltraHD with 10-bit color map. This achieves compatibility with HDR10 and Dolby Vision and maintains support for VP9. In addition, we also have the new graphics control panel that has been updated very recently.