Intel released its Iris Xe Max after being absent from the scene for years. Will this card mark Intel's big return to the race or would it still have a way to go to be able to play in the same league as Nvidia and AMD?
Benchmarking of the Iris Xe Max compared to its competitors
Geekbench 5 comes to test different cards from the 3 manufacturers to find out where Intel's Iris Xe Max, released in September, stands. Intel has not been in the graphics card field for a while and the Iris Xe Max card marks its return after long periods of absence. The Iris Xe Max GPU includes 768 shading units and 96 execution units . The card can be equipped with 3 GB GDDR6 or 4 GB LPDDR4X (case of the Asus VivoBook Flip 14). During testing, the 3 GB VRAM configuration was used.
Here are the benchmarking results: the Iris Xe Max has a score of 11,885 with a maximum frequency of 1.55 GHz (overclocking). The GeForce MX350 card with 640 shading units, equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a boost frequency of 1.46 GHz obtains a score of 13,832. The AMD Radeon RX 550X graphics card has a score of 12,598. The Intel card barely outperforms the Nvidia MX330 card which obtains a score of 11,162. The latter is equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory and 384 shading units. The transistors integrated into the GPU 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 2 years ago or Nvidia's MX350. AMD's card is 5.9% more efficient than Intel's card while Nvidia's MX350 card is 16.3% faster.
Iris Xe Max doubles performance with Tiger Lake processors
The Iris On the other hand, Iris Xe Max can double performance by combining its GPU with the iGPU of its host. For PCs with Tiger Lake processors, the execution units are reduced to 192. Likewise, the shading units are at 1536. In this case, the Iris Xe Max card finds its way and can claim to compete with the cards from other manufacturers. The Acer Swift 3X which will be released in December will be equipped with a Tiger Lake processor and an Iris Xe Max graphics card. We will therefore see at that moment the real performances of this shock duo.
