Intel Xe DG1 (Gen12) OpenCL performance leaks

Intel DG1

Intel made the headlines when the company announced the return to the discrete graphics market. That was in June 2018. Almost two years later there is neither a consumer discrete graphics from Intel available for purchase nor confirmation when to expect such a card.

Back in January, Intel announced DG1 SDV (based on Xe architecture, thus more commonly known as Xe DG1), which is a Software Development Vehicle. This device is not meant for consumers, in fact, everything suggests that you will never be able to buy one (at least not till someone puts one on eBay).

The purpose of the DG1 platform is software development for Intel Graphics. The DG1 is eventually expected to be used as a discrete graphics option for Intel-based laptops. A quote from Argonne provides a brief description of the device:

Argonne:

Xe DG1 GPU is part of the low power (LP) series and is not a high-end product. Chip will be used in laptops with GPU integrated on the motherboard PCIe form factor is the only for the SDV and not a product.

It was already confirmed through previous leaks that the Xe DG1 graphics will feature 96 Execution Units, which equals 768 shading units. This is fewer than the slowest Radeon RX 5000 (1408) or GeForce GTX 16 (896) series graphics card.

What we do know is that the card is also equipped with 3GB memory and likely a 96-bit interface. Clearly, this is not the high-end spec’ed graphics card and it probably shouldn’t be considered a gaming card at all. But even Intel showed some gameplay demos at the launch event, so it’s perfectly fine to look at its performance and compare with whatever competition has to offer.

This is an OpenCL benchmark result comparison from Geekbench and CompuBench results. We chose two lowest-tier graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA. In Radeon RX 5000 lineup the 5500 4GB is the slowest model, whereas for NVIDIA that’s TU117-based GTX 1650 2GB. Since the RX 5500 non-XT is not available, we used the XT model instead. For NVIDIA we chose the 4GB variant of the GTX 1650. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. CompuBench provides aggregated results, for Geekbench we used the best scores.

It is simply to demonstrate where all these cards sit in the entry-level segment. Also bear in mind that we do not know the state of the DG1 drivers.

Source: Geekbench, CompuBench via TechPowerUP, @TUM_APISAK