With its 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors, Intel has been claiming all kinds of performance gains, both on the CPU and GPU sides. In terms of gaming performance, the Gen 12 Xe graphics is expected to be twice as fast than the preceding Gen 11 iGPUs powering Ice Lake. The problem, however, is that, like Ice Lake, Intel has been very stingy with review samples, providing only a few select outlets with custom reference designs. Thanks to one of these reviews, we now know that most of the performance gains with Tiger Lake are due to the increased 28W TDP. At 15W, the flagship, Core i7-1185G7 is either slower or on par with AMD’s competing Ryzen 7 4800U:
In the above rendering and content creation benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 4800U is faster than both the 15W and 28W variants, with the lead over the former exceeding 50% in most scenarios.
WinRar and other LZMA based compression algorithms benefit from Tiger Lake’s faster memory subsystem, but even despite all that the Ryzen 7 4800U and Core i7 (TGL-U) are tied. The 28W variant is slightly faster, but at the cost of a higher power draw.
Now, moving onto the gaming benchmarks, as you can see, the Core i7-1185G7 is either on par or slower than the Ryzen 7 4800U, when the TDP is set to 15W. World of Tanks which is an Intel partner title which favors Tiger Lake, though not by much (~10-15%). Final Fantasy XIV also allows the 15W 1185G7 to beat the 4800U by around 10%, nowhere close to the figures Intel had originally promised.
On increasing the PL1 power to 28W, the Tiger Lake-U flagship manages to come out on top but the deltas are hardly enough to justify the 50% increase in power.
