Some early benchmarks results of Intel's next-generation on-die graphics cores, known as Intel Iris 940, suggest that it could be substantially more powerful than the existing offering, UHD 620. Although the benchmark results are likely first party and not necessarily indicative of real world gaming performance, the numbers suggest that the 940 could be between two and even three times as powerful as existing onboard graphics hardware.
Intel's onboard GPUs have never been powerhouses, but they are typically capable enough to allow basic 1080p gaming in eSports titles and indie games. Intel will extend that to older AAA games too, if the new performance numbers are to be believed.
Likely to show up in Intel's next-gen 14nm Comet Lake CPUs, the Iris Plus 940 will represent the 11th generation of Intel graphics and will be the one preceding the 12th-gen Intel discrete graphics card technology that is expected to launch in 2020. It may also be used in the 10nm Ice Lake generation of CPUs, though it's not clear if that will arrive on desktops in 2020 or 2021.
Looking at the results collated by WCCFTech, we can see that the Irish Plus 940 achieves more than double the score of the UHD 620 in the Aztech ruins, and ALU tests, and more than 50 percent improvement in the Car Chase, 1440P Manhattan scene, and the texturing test.
Also of particular interest is the comparison with AMD Vega graphics in the Ryzen 2700U and 2400G. In those tests, the results are mixed. While the 2400G still takes the lead, the 2700U's limited number of Vega cores means it falls behind Intel's new GPU in most settings.
