Intel says the Iris Xe Max isn't really for gaming. They're not wrong

[Redaktion]

While you can certainly use it for games, that isn't really what the Xe Max was designed for. Its performance-per-dollar will be highest for workloads like HandBrake or Adobe Lightroom rather than pure gaming.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-says-the-Iris-Xe-Max-isn-t-really-for-gaming-They-re-not-wrong.514093.0.html

[Grinnie Jax]

Very handy. If you could possibly game with it, they'd say that it's for gaming. Intel is good at expanding niches, like "okay, our CPUs are worse at everything, but they are better at THIS ONE thing" and they start pumping this thing from every corner.

All in all, those APUs are stuck with a weak RAM bandwidth. The GPU itself is not that bad, but single- or dual-channel slow RAM is holding it behind, both for Intel and AMD. I wonder what the benefits would be from DDR5 - but it will take time to make it mature enough; the first leaked timings are abysmal. I suppose 4-channel RAM can benefit a lot, but I haven't seen such mobile devices at all...

[xpclient]

The problem with Xe Max is that if you get NVIDIA RTX Turing or Ampere, it's outstanding at both: encoding as well as gaming (and graphics pros can instead get the latest Quadro). And maybe with Deep Link, Xe Max slightly outperforms hardware video encoding than the GeForce RTX but at the expense of quality. Turing/Ampere's HEVC video quality remains superior.

So Intel needs to come up with something better than NVENC quality for video encoding if they can't even come close to NVIDIA's gaming performance. AV1 video encoding in the next-gen Xe Max might make it an interesting use case.

[Muhammad Anhar]

I hope AMD can trigger Intel again by releasing AMD APU with Big Navi 2

[sorin]

Intel NUC M15 (Schenker Vision, Adata XPG Xenia)  without dedicated memory offers better performance  in Witcher 3 than Xe Max. Why?

[Spunjji]

"Intel has designed it specifically for video encoding and graphics editing rather than raw gaming prowess"

Are people really buying this? That they designed it for a niche that doesn't really exist... okay.

Intel designed it to be a GPU that does what GPUs do. It sucks at games, so they rationalise it as "not really for gaming" - but other GPUs will do gaming *and* the stuff that Xe Max does, and if you have a Tiger Lake based system then it already has the video hardware integrated which knocks out that one (tiny) potential advantage.

It's pretty sad, but roughly what I was expecting after Raja did his usual shtick.

[Allahu Akbar]

As exptected by sleeping beauty Intel: their innovation comes in 2022.

Until then: don't belt all of your waifus

[Ssgsdhgzzfhczxvvvc]

Then why call it with this stupid name? Xe Max. They should've called it Xe1 or whatever, to say it is first gen, cause anyways, next gpus will be dg2 based.

[JayN]

When this chip was first announced, the announcement included "Deep Link" technology, which is apparently their media sdk support to enable both their discrete and integrated GPUs to do media processing and ai operations. 

There was also discussion that the discrete gpu clocks can run at a higher rate than the integrated GPU's and  that there was some support for improved shared power handling between CPU and GPU, depending on workloads.

[Rocky2]

<designed for. . workloads like HandBrake or Adobe Lightroom>
As Handbrake is my most cpu/gpu intense workload .. how about doing something useful and see how well it does in these workloads?

[8&8]

when intel will use 10nm++ ultrafine with X3D can have an APU in par of MX 450 28W good for egames/mobile games on bluestack LOL and yes maybe WoT SD client

[AHA]

Gamers don't really get most creative use cases - as demonstrated by this article and many of these comments. The Dell is a great laptop for creative applications like Photoshop & Premiere Pro where the Xe Max Deep Link hardware optimisation should see it punch above its dGPU weight against less optimised MX & RTX cards. Should - or at least has with other reviewers. Your benchmarks are considerably lower than those reported elsewhere and as you complain about graphics issues (again, not read these anywhere else) it's likely you should test another laptop sample, just in case. The reason it's worth the cash is because it combines a much better, more accurate screen and much better pen support than competitors and it's not an RGB-tastic gaming brick. In this light, there really are far fewer competitors at this price level than you suppose.

[S.Yu]

>Intel has designed it specifically for video encoding and graphics editing
Who's gonna believe that? This is essentially the exact same chip as the integrated version, now they're saying that the Xe integrated into all TGL chips are mainly directed at video and graphics work as opposed to gaming which is a near universal application?

When this chip was first announced, the announcement included "Deep Link" technology, which is apparently their media sdk support to enable both their discrete and integrated GPUs to do media processing and ai operations. 

I was rather expecting this for all applications, since the two parts are nearly identical it should be as easy as SLI.

Gamers don't really get most creative use cases - as demonstrated by this article and many of these comments. The Dell is a great laptop for creative applications like Photoshop & Premiere Pro where the Xe Max Deep Link hardware optimisation should see it punch above its dGPU weight against less optimised MX & RTX cards. Should - or at least has with other reviewers. Your benchmarks are considerably lower than those reported elsewhere and as you complain about graphics issues (again, not read these anywhere else) it's likely you should test another laptop sample, just in case. The reason it's worth the cash is because it combines a much better, more accurate screen and much better pen support than competitors and it's not an RGB-tastic gaming brick. In this light, there really are far fewer competitors at this price level than you suppose.

Even if "Deep Link" were to result in both chips performing at 100% efficiency, which apparently isn't possible if not solely due to inadequate ventilation, I believe even the lowest current RTX card, the 2060MQ, is far faster than 2x Xe Max's performance. There's no way this could touch an RTX card.
If, and only if you need this along with the stylus(not needed in video applications nor most photo applications) which usually only comes in models with integrated solutions, this particular model might make sense, but that's still assuming this model's digitizer is actually up to par, which isn't something I could say for most Windows hybrids nor for the Dell XPS 13 I currently have.
I don't get the comment about RGB either, the Surface Book for example doesn't have RGB and meets all your requirements, with a likely better dGPU. It's overpriced but it's there, and this Dell isn't exactly cheap either. Most RGB functions in supported models can be turned off as well.

[Dorby]

"Intel says the Iris Xe Max isn't really for gaming. They're not wrong"

Tell that to GPD
youtube.com/watch?v=3LclRTo2YnQ