Intel's Tiger Lake makes gaming on a laptop without a GPU viable

Intel's Tiger Lake makes gaming on a laptop without a GPU viable

Intel's new 11th-generation Tiger Lake CPUs succeed team blue's unexciting Ice Lake generation with some intriguing updates to both CPU capabilities and graphics. While the cores will remain the same, at a maximum of four cores and eight threads, the maximum frequency hits 4.8GHz, even with a 10nm — something that was only previously possible on Intel's 14nm hardware.

The GPU upgrade is the big one though. Finally, Tiger Lake introduces the long awaited Intel XE graphics. These 11th generation onboard GPUs offer up to 96-execution units (768 cores) and offer gaming performance that makes it possible to play AAA games at low or medium settings with entirely playable frame rates, or even high frame rates in Esports titles.

Intel's 9th-generation Iris Plus graphics were already reasonably capable at gaming, but Intel now promises up to 50 percent greater performance in CS:GO, and around 80 percent improvement in more demanding games like Gears Tactics and GRID.

Intel also showed frame rate examples of its new 1185G7 (a terribly named CPU) hitting almost 180 FPS in League of Legends, over 100 in DOTA 2, and 60 FPS in Overwatch.

Tiger Lake also supports PCIExpress 4.0, Bluetooth 5.0, USB 4, and Wi-Fi 6 natively, making it possible to create cheaper laptops with an impressive selection of connectivity features.

Tiger Lake laptops will begin launching throughout the latter half of this year, with a wider selection available in early 2021.