Intel may have finally caught up to AMD in iGPU performance — Meteor Lake's Arc iGPU edges out AMD Phoenix's RDNA 3 iGPU in gaming and synthetic benchmarks

Matthew Connatser
·3 min read
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Intel Meteor Lake Graphics presentation slide deck.
Intel Meteor Lake Graphics presentation slide deck.

Intel's brand-new Meteor Lake CPUs might find a niche as powerful gaming processors thanks to their powerful integrated graphics. In a review by Golden Pig Upgrade, the Core Ultra 7 155H could barely overtake AMD's Ryzen 7 7840HS in gaming and synthetic iGPU benchmarks. It's the first time AMD has lost its lead in integrated graphics since 2019.

Meteor Lake CPUs use a combination of chiplets (or tiles as Intel calls them) to make a complete processor, and this has allowed Intel to equip high-end Meteor Lake chips with a massive integrated GPU. With 128 execution units, this graphics chip is 50% larger than Intel's integrated graphics in Tiger Lake, Alder Lake, and Raptor Lake. Meteor Lake uses the newer Xe-LPG architecture instead of Xe-LP, which is quite old.

In Golden Pig Upgrade's review at 1080p low settings, the Core Ultra 7 155H beat the Ryzen 7 7840HS in four of eight games. That's technically a tie. But Intel's Core Ultra 7 155H had some genuinely massive leads in League of Legends and Dota 2. Things weren't too different at 1080p high settings, though the Core Ultra 7 155H's performance dropped significantly in Hitman 3. But it could be a bug, considering that even the Core i9-13900H was faster than the Core Ultra 7 155H in Hitman 3 at high settings.

The Meteor Lake iGPU tested in eight games.
The Meteor Lake iGPU tested in eight games.

The Core Ultra 7 155H's lead in 3DMark's synthetic graphics benchmarks was much higher than in real games, though, with the margin ranging from 25% to nearly 40% in Intel's favor. That could indicate that Meteor Lake's iGPU has more raw horsepower that actual games aren't taking advantage of. However, it's unclear whether newer drivers could extract that extra performance or if 3DMark is particularly sensitive to the Core Ultra 7 155H's quad-channel memory configuration.

Power efficiency is also in Intel's favor, sort of. In League of Legends, the Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 5 125H had better efficiency than the Ryzen 7 7840HS, though not considerable. However, efficiency will significantly depend on TDP, as the two Meteor Lake chips are only more efficient than the Ryzen 7 7840HS with a power consumption of 30 watts or more. At 15 watts, the Ryzen 7 7840HX was about 30% more efficient than the Core Ultra 7 155H, and that probably means Meteor Lake won't be the processor of choice for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

Meteor Lake is probably Intel's best showing in integrated graphics since Ice Lake for laptops in late 2019. However, then, Intel was competing with old Zen+ APUs in the Ryzen 3000 series, and Ice Lake quickly lost the crown to Ryzen 4000 APUs with the Zen 2 architecture and a reworked iGPU in early 2020. This time, Intel is going up against AMD's latest RDNA 3 architecture, and it's just barely clinched a victory.