Intel launches its Iris Xe Max graphics cards

The race among manufacturers to showcase their latest generation graphics cards is on. Following AMD's announcement of the release of its Radeon RX 6000 series cards starting November 18th of this year and the opening of pre-orders for Nvidia's GeForce 30 series cards, it is now Intel's turn to launch its Iris Xe Max graphics cards.

Features of Intel's Iris Xe Max graphics cards

These cards are being released today in China and will arrive in the US in the coming weeks. They are being launched with ultra-light laptops. Examples include the Acer Swift 3x equipped with a Tiger Lake processor, the Asus VivoBook Flip TP470 , and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 . The Iris Xe Max marks Intel's return to the graphics card market after a long absence.

The Iris Xe Max graphics card features 96 execution units . Its base clock speed is 1.65 GHz. The GPU is built on a 10nm ultra-thin manufacturing process. This Intel graphics card is equipped with 4GB of LPDDR4x with a transfer speed of 68GB/s . It supports Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Adaptive Sync, and Async Compute. This card supports DirectX 12.

Iris Xe Max efficiency

The Geekbench 5 team has already tested this card and assigned it a performance score. The Iris Xe Max scored 11,885. It performs less well than the GeForce MX350, which has 640 shading units and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The latter scored 13,832. AMD's Radeon RX 550X graphics card scored 12,598. Nvidia's MX330, on the other hand, is less powerful than the Iris Xe Max, scoring only 11,162.

Intel, however, combines its Iris Xe Max graphics card with the Tiger Lake processor via the Deep Link . This allows for a synergy of power between the GPU and the iGPU. In this way, the execution units are reduced to 192 and the shading units to 1536. While the card alone allows the Iris Xe Max to outperform Nvidia's GeForce MX330, this card-processor combination effectively doubles the graphics card's performance.

The three tech giants laid their cards on the table this week by announcing their latest generation graphics cards. AMD will release the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT on November 18, 2020, followed by the Radeon RX 6900 XT on December 8. Nvidia, meanwhile, is opening pre-orders for its GeForce 3000 series cards. Intel, for its part, is launching its Iris Xe Max card from China with its laptops equipped with Tiger Lake processors . All three manufacturers have pulled out all the stops to offer high-performance graphics cards. Customers will be spoiled for choice.