Just recently, Gregory Bryant, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s desktop client platform, has came out with a confident statement saying that Intel Iris Graphics can outperform almost 80% of discrete GPUs in the market. Currently, the Iris integrated graphics technology can only be found on Skylake processors.
In addition to coming up with such a bold statement, Bryant went on further and mentioned that integrated graphics nowadays are almost 30 times better than what they were five years ago. Intel had initially released two versions of the Iris Graphics called Iris and Iris Pro. To be clear, the Iris Pro is the one with enough power to outmatch plenty of dedicated graphics cards. However, Intel has admitted that it hasn’t done a good job in showcasing what the Iris integrated graphics technology can do. Hence, the bold statement.
According to Intel, its integrated graphics technology has improved so much that consumers can afford to connect up to three 4K monitors simultaneously only by using an Iris integrated graphics processor. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: 4K gaming on an integrated graphics card, as tempting as it sounds, is not possible. The same can be said about VR gaming as well. But, according to sources, the Iris Pro is said to be on-par with the GTX 750 or the Radeon R7 260; talk about improvements.
When Intel announced the Skylake processors, integrated GPU technology took a giant leap forward. This was due to the CPU coming with an integrated GPU with 1152 gigaflops of processing power. With this kind of processing power, casual gaming is definitely possible. For all other types of gaming, there’s always Nvidia and AMD discrete graphics cards. Regardless, improvements in terms of integrated graphics technology means that days of gaming of a dedicated graphics card could one day be a thing of the past.
