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Intel Xe DG1

Intel Xe DG1: Review and Analysis of a Budget Segment Graphics Card

April 2025

Introduction

The Intel Xe DG1 graphics card, released in 2021, marked the company's first foray into the world of discrete graphics after a long hiatus. By 2025, it has carved out a niche as a budget solution for office tasks, media centers, and casual gaming. In this article, we will explore how relevant the DG1 is today, how it handles modern tasks, and who should consider it.

Architecture and Key Features

Xe-LP: Energy Efficiency First

The DG1 is built on the Xe-LP (Low Power) architecture, optimized for low power consumption. The manufacturing process is 10nm SuperFin, which ensures compactness and moderate heating.

Unique Features

- XeSS (Xe Super Sampling): Similar to NVIDIA's DLSS, this feature uses AI to upscale resolution with minimal quality loss. By 2025, XeSS support has been extended to over 50 games, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Zero Dawn.

- Hardware Ray Tracing: While basic ray tracing is implemented, performance leaves much to be desired—the enabling of RT reduces FPS by 40-60%.

Conclusion: The DG1 is a hybrid solution for everyday tasks with future potential, but it is not suited for hardcore gaming.

Memory: Modest Yet Sufficient

- Type and Size: 4 GB GDDR6 with a 128-bit bus.

- Bandwidth: 68 GB/s.

For gaming at 1080p on low settings, this is adequate, but modern projects with high textures (e.g., Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora) may experience stutters due to a lack of VRAM. In professional applications, 4 GB is the minimum threshold for editing up to 4K resolution.

Gaming Performance

1080p: Comfort Zone

- CS2: 90–110 FPS (high settings).

- Fortnite: 60–70 FPS (medium, without RT).

- Elden Ring: 45–55 FPS (low).

1440p and 4K: Only for Undemanding Titles

In Dota 2 or Rocket League, the DG1 achieves stable 60 FPS at 1440p, but in AAA titles (e.g., Starfield), 1080p is the limit.

Ray Tracing: Experimental Option

Activating RT in Minecraft reduces FPS to 25–30 frames. It is recommended to use hybrid rendering with XeSS to compensate.

Professional Tasks

Video Editing

- Adobe Premiere Pro: Rendering acceleration thanks to Quick Sync support. 4K projects are processed 30% faster than with integrated graphics.

- DaVinci Resolve: Good performance in color correction, but complex effects can cause lag.

3D Modeling

In Blender, the DG1 shows modest results due to limited OpenCL support. Acceptable for simple scenes, but for complex projects, it is better to choose NVIDIA with CUDA.

Scientific Calculations

Support for OpenCL 3.0 allows the card to be used in machine learning (light models) and physical simulations, but performance lags behind even the NVIDIA GTX 1650.

Power Consumption and Thermal Output

- TDP: 30–50 W (depending on the variant).

- Cooling: Passive or compact cooler. Even under load, temperatures do not exceed 70°C.

Recommendations:

- A case with at least one fan for heat dissipation.

- Ideal for mini-PCs and HTPCs.

Comparison with Competitors

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6): 15–20% faster in games but more expensive ($150 vs. $100–120 for DG1).

- AMD Radeon RX 6400: Comparable in price ($110) but better optimized for PCIe 4.0.

- Intel Arc A310: A successor to DG1 with 6 GB GDDR6 and improved driver support. Priced at $130 and offers 25% higher performance.

Conclusion: The DG1 is relevant only under strict budget constraints.

Practical Tips

Power Supply

A 300 W power supply is sufficient. Examples: Corsair CV450 or be quiet! System Power 10.

Compatibility

- Motherboards: Requires UEFI with Resizable BAR support. Better compatibility with Intel 10th generation platforms and newer.

- Drivers: By 2025, stability has improved, but artifacts may occur in older projects.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Quiet operation.

- Attractive price ($100–120).

Cons:

- Limited performance.

- Only 4 GB of memory.

- Narrow software compatibility.

Final Conclusion: Who Should Consider the Intel Xe DG1?

This graphics card is suitable for:

1. Office PCs and media centers, where silence and efficiency are crucial.

2. Casual gamers willing to play on low settings.

3. Budget-conscious users needing an upgrade from integrated graphics.

If you are looking for a card in the $100–120 range and do not plan to run the latest AAA titles, the DG1 will be a reliable option. However, for professional tasks or future gaming needs, it is better to consider the Intel Arc A310 or alternatives from AMD/NVIDIA.

Prices are accurate as of April 2025 for new devices.

Basic

Label Name

Intel

Platform

Desktop

Model Name

Xe DG1

Generation

Xe Graphics

Base Clock

900MHz

Boost Clock

1550MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x8

Transistors

Unknown

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

Intel

Process Size

10 nm

Architecture

Generation 12.1

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

LPDDR4X

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

2133MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

68.26 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

31.00 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

62.00 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

3.968 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

496.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.944 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

640

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

30W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.4

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

200W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.944 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon R9 M290X Mac Edition

2.037 +4.8%

Radeon Graphics 512SP Mobile

2.007 +3.2%

Xe DG1

1.944

Radeon HD 8770 OEM

1.92 -1.2%

GeForce GTX 950

1.862 -4.2%