Intel 10nm Ice Lake Benchmarks: 10th Gen Core i7 Performance Explored

The Iris Plus Graphics integrated into the Intel Core i7-1065G7 supports variable rate shading. Variable Rate Shading offers developers finer-grained control of shading rates in any given scene. Areas that are not in focus or obscured in a scene, for example, could be rendered with lower quality levels, freeing up GPU resources and ultimately increasing performance. 3DMark recently added a VRS feature test, which we ran on the Ice Lake-based system...

3DMark Variable Rate Shading Intelligent GPU Resource Utilization

If you look at the lanterns in the background and some of the finer details in the periphery of the screen-captures from 3DMark's VRS test above, you'll see how enabling variable rate shading in this test affects the image quality. We should note, however, that when the scene is in motion, picking up on the differences in real-time is far more difficult, which is kind of the whole point of VRS.

The performance impact of VRS, however, is much more stark. With VRS enabled, both Ice Lake / Iris Plus configurations showed a 40% improvement in frame rate.

High Resolution Game Tests 1080P Gaming On Integrated Graphics

We also ran some high-resolution game tests with Middle Earth: Shadow Of War, Strange Brigade, and Hitman. All of the games were run at 1080p with Medium details, in an effort to achieve somewhat playable framerates on the processors' low-power integrated graphics solutions...





We probably should have cranked the details down a but further, but the relative performance trend would have stayed the same. As you can see, the the Core i7-1065G7's Gen 11 Iris Plus graphics with 64 EUs remains competitive with Vega 10 throughout and improves upon the previous-generation significantly. Ice Lake actually notches a victory in Shadow Of War in its 25W configuration. We should mention that minimum framerates were much lower on the Intel setups, however. For example, whereas Vega 10 dipped to 5 FPS in Hitman or 19 FPS in Strange Brigade, the Intel setups hit .5 - 1 FPS. We suspect Intel has much room for improvement in this regard though, as its graphics drivers and software are further optimized.