The Intel Xe “Alchemist” iGPU on Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” CPUs can deliver satisfactory performance at 1080p but might need upscaling methods.
Intel’s Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S CPUs offer 60 fps at 1080p Medium settings in many games, the biggest graphics uplift for Intel’s desktop processors
Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200S CPUs may have received mixed reception, but there are some good and bad points about the CPUs. While gaming isn’t their strong point, they are decent in productivity. However, as many gamers were looking forward to the performance uplift these chips can provide, it’s crucial to analyze how well these CPUs can perform with discrete GPUs or without them.
Unfortunately, the initial benchmarks don’t favor them with the former, but the latter seems to be satisfactory. The performance of integrated graphics on the Core Ultra 200S chips may have surpassed expectations. Unlike previous generations, the Core Ultra 200S brings powerful iGPUs based on the Arc Alchemist architecture.
In the recent review by ETA Prime, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K was tested with its iGPU, which brings 4 Xe Cores and a clock speed of 2000MHz. This is quite inferior on paper compared to the iGPUs we see on the powerful APU solutions from AMD. However, the benchmarks show a big jump in gaming performance, so much so that the iGPU on the Core Ultra 9 285K matched the GTX 1050 Ti.
Image Source: ETA Prime
When tested in 3DMark Time Spy, the iGPU scored a good 2288 Graphics score, which is just 2% less than the 2336 points scored by the GTX 1050 Ti. The latter has been one of the most popular budget gaming GPUs of the Pascal series and can deliver 40–60 fps in most titles on medium settings.
To test this in real-world gaming benchmarks, ETA Prime tested the iGPU on Core Ultra 9 285K in various games and found out that the Arc Graphics is indeed capable of playing most games with satisfactory FPS at 1080p with medium settings.
Image Source: ETA Prime
What’s surprising is that in most cases the CPU didn’t go over 60W and stayed mostly between 50-80W at maximum. This shows that the Core Ultra 200S does have a good efficiency advantage over the previous-gen chips when running games on the iGPU.
Games
Graphics Presets
Average FPS
Doom Eternal
1080p, Med, Dynamic Scale On
68
OG SKYRIM
1080p, Med
60
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
1080p, Med
42)/60+(FSR Frame Gen)
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
1080p, Med, XeSS Performance
40
Fallout 4
1080p, Med
60
Overwatch 2
1080, Med/Low
120+
Spider-Man Remastered
1080p, Med
40+/80+(FSR Frame Gen)
Cyberpunk 2077
1080p, Low, Xess Performance
42
However, these are still far from competing with the powerful AMD Ryzen 8000G chips, but the current performance uplift is appreciable. It’s a missed opportunity for Intel to not include the new Xe2 cores on the Arrow Lake chips as that would have made the iGPU portion even more interesting given what we have seen of Lunar Lake, especially at low TDPs. AMD’s Zen 5 or Zen 4 CPUs only come with 2 RDNA 2 compute units, making the Arrow Lake options a far better iGPU solution, but gamers running these CPUs will likely be using a discrete graphics card which will provide way better performance.
Now, theoretically, the performance of the Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K should be similar. They have the same iGPU with the same number of Xe cores but a slightly slower clock on the Core Ultra 5 245K. The Core Ultra 5 245K is priced at $319 and could be a good alternative to budget GPUs.
Nonetheless, if you are goingg to build a gaming computer without a discrete GPU, we would still advise going with Ryzen 8000G chips, which offer better performance for a much lower price. It’s still great to see Intel improving upon the iGPU, and we hope to see more advancements by Team Blue in the graphics segment.
News Source: ETA PRIME
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