Intel has released its Iris Xe Max after being absent from the scene for years. Will this card mark Intel's grand return to the game, or does it still have a long way to go to compete on equal footing with Nvidia and AMD?
Benchmarking the Iris Xe Max against its competitors
Geekbench 5 tests various graphics cards from the three manufacturers to see how Intel's Iris Xe Max, released in September, performs. Intel had been absent from the graphics card market for some time, and the Iris Xe Max marks its return after a long absence. The Iris Xe Max's GPU includes 768 shading units and 96 execution units . The card can be equipped with 3GB of GDDR6 or 4GB of LPDDR4X (as in the Asus VivoBook Flip 14). The 3GB VRAM configuration was used in this test.
Here are the benchmark results: the Iris Xe Max scored 11,885 with a maximum frequency of 1.55 GHz (overclocked). The GeForce MX350, with 640 shading units, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, and a boost clock of 1.46 GHz, scored 13,832. AMD's Radeon RX 550X scored 12,598. Intel's card barely surpasses Nvidia's MX330, which scored 11,162. The latter is equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and 384 shading units. The GPU's integrated transistors switch at 1.594 GHz in boost clock.
According to this data, the Iris Xe Max cannot compete with either the Radeon RX 550X, which was released two years ago, or Nvidia's MX350. AMD's card is 5.9% more powerful than Intel's card, while Nvidia's MX350 is 16.3% faster.
Iris Xe Max doubles performance with Tiger Lake processors
The Iris Xe Max graphics card alone doesn't hold a candle to its competitors, especially when it comes to the latest releases from AMD and Nvidia. However, the Iris Xe Max can double its performance by combining its GPU with the integrated GPU (iGPU) of its host system. For PCs with Tiger Lake processors, the number of execution units is reduced to 192, and the number of shading units is increased to 1536. In this configuration, the Iris Xe Max card comes into its own and can compete with cards from other manufacturers. The Acer Swift 3X, launching in December, will be equipped with a Tiger Lake processor and an Iris Xe Max graphics card. We will then see the actual performance of this powerful combination.
