Is Intel Iris Xe DG1 slower than AMD's Radeon RX 550?

Well-known leaker @Tum_Apisak reported the first benchmark run by Intel's Iris Xe DG1 graphics card. Apparently, the GPU, tested on Basemark, achieved similar performance to AMD's Radeon RX 550, a product that has been around for at least four years.

If we compare the manufacturing processes, the DG1 is obviously the most technologically advanced offer. The DG1 is based on Intel's latest 10nm SuperFin node, while the Radeon RX 550 uses the Lexa die, which was made with GlobalFoundries' 14nm process. Both the DG1 and the Radeon RX 550 under review were manufactured by ASUS. The ASUS DG1-4G is equipped with a passive heatsink, while the ASUS Radeon RX 550 4G requires active cooling with a single fan. The Radeon RX 550 has a TDP of 50W, while the DG1 stops at 30W, which is why the latter can work safely in fanless mode.

The ASUS DG1-4G features a reduced variant of the Iris GPU Xe Max, which means it only has 80 Execution Units (EU) at its disposal. This configuration offers 640 shader units with a maximum clock of 1,500MHz. As for the memories, the ASUS DG1-4G has 4GB of LPDDR4X-4266 on a 128bit interface. In contrast, the ASUS Radeon RX 550 4G features 512 shading units with a base clock of 1,100MHz and a boost clock of 1,183MHz. The graphics card's 4GB of 7Gb / s GDDR5 memory communicates across a 128-bit bus for an overall bandwidth of up to 112GB / s.

In terms of FP32 performance, the DG1 offers up to 2.11TFLOP, while the Radeon RX 550 reaches up to 1.21TFLOP. On paper, therefore, the DG1 should be superior, but we know that FP32 performances are not the most important to consider. Both systems tested on the Basemark benchmark were based on the same processor, the Intel Core i3-10100F. The DG1 scored 17,289 points, while the Radeon RX 550 came up to 17,619 points in the Vulkan test. Therefore, the Radeon RX 550 was up to 1.9% faster than the DG1. Of course, it's too early to declare a definitive winner without more thorough testing. After all, Intel has always presented the DG1 as an entry level graphics card, so it is certainly not surprising to see it offer rather low performance.

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