One of the more exciting aspects of Intel’s upcoming 10nm “Ice Lake” CPUs lies in its integrated graphics. While still a far cry from a dedicated GPU, the company has boasted that its Gen11 iGPU is powerful enough to run popular games in 1080p.
According to Intel’s own benchmarks, CS: Go enjoys a 1.72x improvement from Gen9 and manages framerates over 70 FPS, while Fortnite and Overwatch see a 1.43x and 1.42x improvement, respectively. Three Kingdoms also gets a big gain, at 2.08x. (The majority of these titles were running at the “low” setting, however.)
Other benchmarks show it to be on par with AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700U (RX Vega 10 graphics). Ice Lake U (25W) actually manages a number of substantial victories, such as 1.16x better performance in Overwatch.
Intel is waiting until Tuesday to give us more details about Ice Lake, but for now these details certainly seem promising. Basically, you can expect to see ultraportables this year that’ll actually be able to play a few games, while still being very thin and light.