A leaked benchmark for Intel's upcoming Arc integrated graphics has been spotted by Videocardz, and the performance is quite remarkable. It's roughly on par with Intel's and AMD's entry level desktop graphics cards, and also somewhat faster than the Radeon 780M, which is paired with high-end Ryzen 7040 APU. However, there's much we don't know about this leak, making it hard to see the full picture.
The Arc iGPU was paired with the Core Ultra 7 155H, a Meteor Lake CPU set to launch on December 14. It achieved a score of 33,948 in Geekbench 6's OpenCL graphics test, which is pretty high for an integrated GPU — higher than AMD's discrete RX 6400 as well as the integrated Radeon 780M, according to Geekbench's official leaderboard.
The iGPU within the 155H is actually in second place here, which is pretty impressive. Beating the 780M in particular is important though, since it's the GPU that powers the ROG Ally and other high-end gaming handhelds. It's also a bit of a flex that one of Intel's integrated GPUs is better than AMD's cheapest graphics card.
But there are some important caveats to all of this data. First, this isn't a gaming benchmark, but a compute benchmark. AMD's RX 7900 XTX is only as fast as the RTX 3090 according to Geekbench 6, which we know isn't true when it comes to gaming. The Arc A380 also registers a big win against the RX 6400, but our review found that they're more or less on par. (Though, it's possible the A380 has gained some ground thanks to newer drivers.)
The intensity of the benchmark also has to be brought into question. The Geekbench 6 OpenCL benchmark only takes about a minute or so to finish, and we tested it on an RX 6400 to verify that for lower-end hardware. It's well known that sustained performance on mobile processors isn't very good, and if this was tested in a longer benchmark, then maybe the performance wouldn't have looked as good.
Even if the leak is real, there are so many questions hanging over it that the performance data is hard to analyze. And we don't know a thing about power consumption, which is pretty important for a laptop chip. It's definitely a good sign for Intel's integrated GPU to be so fast in a compute benchmark, but it's hard to tell if that means it'll be good for gaming.
