There is finally something new about Intel’s high-end graphics card for gamers who go by the catchy name Xe-HPG DG2 – pronounced: Xe High Performance Gaming Discrete Graphics 2.
Together with an Alder Lake processor from Intel, alias Core i 12000, the potential future competitor for Nvidia and AMD appears in the Geekbench database and reveals at least part of its preliminary specifications. How does DG2 perform in the benchmark?
The specs of Intel’s Xe-HPG DG2
The graphics card listed in Geekbench is referred to as “Intel Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller”, where Gen12 is the reference to the Xe architecture. For this purpose, 512 Compute Units are specified, which at Intel are called Execution Units (EUs). Each EU is equipped with eight shader units.
This results in a total of 4,096 shaders– or computing cores. Incidentally, Nvidia’s and AMD’s counterparts are called CUDAs or stream processors. The RTX 3090 has 10,496 shaders, the RX 6900 XT 5,120 shaders.
However, the number of processing cores is hardly comparable, which is proven by the RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT, which are on par in practice. Read our detailed review of the RX 6900 XT in comparison with the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. You can find out how the RTX 3090 actually has 10,496 cores in a separate article.
Videospeicher: In addition to the high core number, Intel’s DG2 offers 12.6 GB of video memory, according to Geekbench data.
Geekbench likes to spit out incorrect numbers, especially when it comes to entries about early test samples, which is why we assume 12.0 GB and GDDR6 modules. The maximum clock rate of the GPU is also specified as 1.8 GHz.
The specs at a glance
- Name: Intel Xe-HPH DG2 (Gen12)
- Arithmetic units: 512 Execution Units respektive 4.096 Shader
- Clock rate: 1,800 MHz maximum
- Videospeicher: 12.0 GB, probably GDDR6
So far, so impressive. The situation is different with the benchmark results: The OpenCL score of Xe-DG2 is really bad 7,943 points. In the charts you have to scroll very far down to find a comparable result. Only the Geforce GTX 560 delivers a match with 7,981 points – and it is over ten years old.
Benchmarks are not yet meaningful
At first glance these are of course terrifying values. Just to make this clear again: Nvidia’s RTX 3090 comes to 205,553, AMD’s RX 6900 XT to 164,218 points.
It has to be said, however, that the guided graphics card is likely to be a very early test sample, the drivers of which have certainly not yet been optimized. The final version will move to other regions.
Whether Intel can catch up directly with Nvidia and AMD in the high-end segment, is still doubtful. We rather expect that DG2 will “only” be able to compete with entry-level models from the competition – which would still be an excellent result for a career changer.
GameStar-Talk: The fact that the number of processing cores, as described above, does not alone determine the performance, is also proven by the battle at eye level between the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 and the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT.