Intel Ice Lake-U @ 10nm with Gen 11 graphics, a major performance improvement, but insufficient

Robert Sole 27 May 2019

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Shown the performance data of the Intel Ice Lake-U @ 10nm, which incorporate Gen 11 graphics, which offer a significant leap in gaming performance.

Before starting Computex 2019 we are already learning data. Intel wanted to reveal before its Keynote at the Chinese event, a performance preview of its Ice Lake-U processors. These processors are intended for the portable equipment market and are based on 10nm lithography. It is not the only novelty of these processors and it is that they will also integrate Gen 11 graphics. These graphics represent a significant performance improvement compared to the current Gen 9. As always, depending on the model the iGPU will be more powerful or less.

Intel shows the first data of the Ice Lake-U

The company has published a performance comparison of an indeterminate Ice Lake-U with the Ryzen 7 3700U. The AMD processor is the top of the range for laptops and integrates Radeon Vega 10 graphics. According to Intel, in most cases the performance with its processor is superior to that of AMD. This processor would carry the most powerful iGPU that they launched and we see that the difference, oscillates in the 5% improvement, in some specific cases, it is more.

If we compare the Gen 9 iGPU with the Gen 11 iGPU, we see the difference is much higher. We can see that the minimum improvement is 40% and normally ranges from 70-80% improvement. The Three Kingdoms game at 1080p resolution with low graphics doubles the performance. Wolrd of Thanks in medium quality and 1080l resolution, offers an improvement of 81%. Fortnite in 1080p and low quality offers us an improvement of 43%. Clearly these integrated graphics are still not great for gaming, but they are not as bad as current Gen 9 iGPUs.

In addition, they wanted to show the performance of the variable shading rate (VRS) in DirectX 12. What VRS does is not load areas that are not visible, thus reducing the graphic load. If it is activated, a performance improvement of 40% is noted compared to having it deactivated. If the same thing is done compared to the Ryzen 7 3700U, we see how it goes from being behind in performance to surpass this processor by 32% in graphics performance.

These data must always be taken with caution, since we do not know the parameters to perform the benchmark. It is already known that companies use tricks to sweep at home.