I experienced this firsthand while reviewing 11th-gen Intel Core laptops through the first half of this year.

Intel Iris Xe can easily break 4,000, a staggering four-fold improvement. Intel UHD 620 rarely broke a score of 1,000 in 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark.

Thereby, it won't be long until we get to see what the Iris Xe Max is really made of.It’s no exaggeration to say Intel Xe, when compared to the company’s prior UHD 620 integrated graphics, delivers one of the largest gen-on-gen performance upgrades of the past decade. The Acer Swift 3X (opens in new tab), which is powered by 11th Generation Tiger Lake processors and Iris Xe Max graphics, is scheduled to debut in December. That should be 96 EUs from the DG1 and 96 EUs from the Tiger Laker iGPU, so everything apparently falls into place. The dual-GPU arrangement was sporting up to 192 EUs or 1,536 shader cores. Although the concept is unconfirmed, a pair of Xe GPUs (opens in new tab) have already come forth, proving its feasibility.

However, if you were to combine the GPU with Tiger Lake's iGPU in a multi-GPU setup, that would be another story. When alone, the Iris Xe Max probably won't leave a dent on some of its rivals.

We suspect that Intel is creating a small, mobile ecosystem with its Tiger Lake chips, and that's where the Iris Xe Max's real value lies. In comparison to the Radeon RX 550X, the two-year old AMD GPU outperformed the Iris Xe Max by up to 6%. On the contrary, the GeForce MX350 delivered up to 16.4% higher performance than Intel's offering. The Geekbench 5 numbers showed that the Iris Xe Max was just 6.5% faster than the GeForce MX330. The Iris Xe Max never aimed to compete in the performance bracket therefore, it isn't a big shocker that the GPU barely beats Nvidia's GeForce MX330.

Intel iris xe integrated graphics