We are not very excited about Intel's DG1 discrete GPU because the performance of the chip, which was first unveiled at the CES trade show, was somewhat lackluster. Since then, hopes of a high-end Intel Xe gaming GPU or an add-in card option for desktops soon have been dashed. Nevertheless, it could be a decent gaming laptop.

I wouldn't hold high hopes for gaming performance, as an Intel chip named "Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller" (almost certainly Intel's aka DG1 GPU) was found by serial leaker TUM_APISAK in the discovered in the Geekbench benchmark database. This GPU's OpenCL performance score of 55,373 is slightly faster than Nvidia's low-power MX250 dGPU's score of 48,000.

The higher-power GTX 1650 Mobile dGPU, with 50 watts of graphics power in the non-Max-Q variant, easily outperforms the leaked Intel chip with a score of over 110,000. In the AMD lineup, the RX 560 scores around 65,000 and outperforms Intel's dGPUs with a score of The RX 550, on the other hand, falls just short of the Intel Xe with an OpenCL compute score of around 50,000.

Now, before we get into the comparison, we still don't know how representative this benchmark is of the DG1's performance on launch day. Drivers could also be shoddy, and Geekbench results could vary widely.

The DG1 GPU alone, even with a fairly significant performance boost (which we do not expect to happen), is unlikely to blow away current existing Nvidia and AMD mobile graphics cards. [However, the DG1 will likely be included with Tiger Lake CPUs in future designs. These chips are also said to have equivalent Gen 12 (Intel Xe) iGPUs, which have shown comparable performance to AMD's mobile Ryzen processors.

The combination of twin Xe GPUs may enhance performance for highly parallel tasks or allow for clever power sharing between the two GPUs. But we gamers shouldn't hold our breath. Intel showed how to do multi-GPU rendering at GDC, but its approach relies heavily on the implementation outlined in DX12, which is not widely supported.