Intel's recently released Core Ultra 250K Plus CPU may not have a big GPU, but it's faster than a Steam Deck & plays games at 1080p.
Intel's 4Xe Core iGPU On Core Ultra 250K Plus Is Very Usable With Faster Than Steam Deck Perf, & Offers AV1 Encoding
Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs come with a 4 Xe core iGPU. This configuration is enabled on all chips, including the recently released Core Ultra 200S Plus offerings.
Overclocker, Alva Jonathan aka Lucky_n00b, took the Intel Core Ultra 250K Plus for some tests and found out the iGPU to be very usable. First of all, 4 Xe cores won't offer the best graphics performance; they're much slower than the higher-end 8 and 12-core parts found on Lunar Lake and Panther Lake SoCs. The Arrow Lake lineup also makes use of the older Xe+ Alchemist architecture, while Lunar Lake leverages Xe2, and Panther Lake utilizes Xe3.
But for a desktop chip, these iGPUs are primarily meant for diagnostic purposes or to use them as a secondary video output. For most users, these iGPUs have little to offer since desktop builders always rely on a discrete GPU for their graphics needs, but the iGPU on Arrow Lake CPUs has some interesting things to offer.
First of all, looking at the overall performance in 3DMark Fire Strike and OpenCL benchmarks, the iGPU offers 1.8 TFLOPs of compute and delivers slightly better performance than a Steam Deck with 8 RDNA 2 compute units. The 4 Xe iGPU is comparable to an AMD Ryzen 5 8500G APU with 4 RDNA 2 CUs. The tiny iGPU doesn't require a lot of bandwidth and runs fine even with DDR5-6000 memory.
But despite its tiny nature, the 4Xe cores do provide some gaming capabilities, such as 91 FPS on average at 1080p in Counter-Strike 2 with Low Settings and FSR (Balanced). Genshin delivers 60 FPS on average at 1080p with Low settings with FSR 2 enabled, while Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Tomb Raider offer around 30 FPS on average with low settings.
Another good use of the iGPU on the Intel Core Ultra 200S Desktop CPUs is their AV1 Encoder, which is only available on models with the iGPU enabled, so KF and F models won't feature this capability. With AV1, you can encode 4K 60 FPS without burdening your discrete GPU. These are some of the interesting options that you can go for if you are going to leverage the iGPU on these chips. These iGPUs also show good overclocking capabilities, with up to 3 GHz OCs previously showcased.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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