From both a performance and efficiency standpoint, in this regard 10nm is a bit of a disappointment.
But as far as a single-chip solution goes, Ice Lake is quite decent.
Today, of course, we plan to switch gears to take a look at gaming performance.
Why is this, and why so slow for so long?
This stems from the hardware they’ve been using for the past five years.
Take Intel’s Broadwell Core i7-5500U.
Then we move through Kaby Lake, Kaby Lake Refresh, Whiskey Lake and now Comet Lake.
The Whiskey Lake Core i7-8565U to cite an example, has that part clocked at 1150 MHz.
But it gets worse.
About 25% more raw performance across five and a half years.
Even the base G1 tier is faster thanks to a 33% increase in execution units.
It’s a big jump across the board.
Previously we were talking about Whiskey Lake offering ~442 GFLOPS of compute performance.
That’s a massive increase that allows Intel to proudly proclaim this their first 1 TFLOP integrated graphics solution.
At native 1080p with render detail set to “quality,” this should be a playable configuration.
But with Ice Lake, we’re seeing gains of 38% for the 25W configuration over 15W.
This makes the 25W version much more desirable for portable gaming than 15W.
The 1065G7 is 87% faster, a mighty big increase.
Next up we have GTA V running at native 1080p on the lowest tweaks.
Strategy games like Civilization VI are great to play on an ultraportable.
We see a 35% improvement comparing Ice Lake and Comet Lake at 15W.
As expected, at 25W the chip has more room to breathe and delivers better results.
Gears 5 is a very intensive and future-looking benchmark given we’re running at 1080p with medium parameters.
We’re also seeing a fairly standard cadence of performance.
At the bottom of the ‘reasonable’ performance class, we have the 15W Core i7-1065G7.
Sitting above all of those is Nvidia’s MX250, offering a ~30% performance increase.
This hierarchy is reasonably consistent across the games we’ve tested so far.
From those five benchmarks, we’re starting to get a typical idea of how Ice Lake stacks up.
Playable performance, or not?
To answer that, we’ll need to look at more titles.
We’d say Civilization VI is also playable, with GTA V in a borderline state.
Gears 5 at medium controls is a no go.
It looks absolutely terrible, too, so we’ll say the game is unplayable on Ice Lake.
Other modern triple-A games we tested showed something similar (25W configuration).
At low prefs and a pixelated experience, we still couldn’t hit 30 FPS.
The Division 2 is a beautiful game but unfortunately it doesn’t run well on integrated graphics either.
F1 2019 we’d class as borderline playable.
The Outer Wilds was also often dipping below 30 FPS and the game felt really sluggish.
With that we’ve safely established that graphically intensive titles are generally going to be unplayable on integrated graphics.
How about popular and often less GPU intensive competitive games?
Rainbow Six Siege is a mixed bag.
At 15W, we barely hit 30 FPS using low parameters at 720p.
Apex Legends is straight up unplayable, the stuttering is awful.
There’s better news for Fortnite though.
At 15W, things get a little dicey.
Native 1080p on the lowest configs is a 30 FPS experience.
And finally we’ve got Overwatch.
Adding more execution units into the mix was the right choice.
OEMs can now opt for a one-chip solution that’s semi-decent in this arena.
However there are also areas that are less impressive.
This means Ice Lake doesn’t really move the needle on what is possible in a single-chip design.
Having an MX250 alongside a 15W U-series CPU likely consumes more power.
The fastest ultraportables are also integratingNvidia’s GTX 1650 Max-Q.
Granted, it’s also a more costly option.
Normally we wouldn’t bother pointing out that discrete GPUs are faster.
And it’s all possible in the same form factors Ice Lake targets.
That’s not to say Ice Lake is pointless.
That’s what we hope happens, it’s up to Intel to execute.
