Intel’s Tiger Lake CPUs can handle Fortnite smoothly without a graphics card

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Editor's note: Intel has reached out and clarified that the Gen12 and Xe graphics referred to in this presentation were mistranslated. The speaker at the IDC event didn't mention ray tracing or refer to the Xe graphics in Tiger lake as 'Gen 12'. This was all due to a mistranslation, thanks to Google Translate. The original story continues below ...

Intel has revealed more about its incoming Gen12 graphics, which by all accounts will mean you’ll be able to play contemporary esports games like Fortnite at a fluid 60 frames per second (in Full HD resolution) on gaming laptops with an integrated GPU.

These revelations come from the Intel Developer Conference (IDC) over in Tokyo, where the chip giant had plenty to say about the Gen12 graphics which will be incorporated with its Tiger Lake laptop processors (the successor to current Ice Lake chips) and Xe discrete GPUs, both of which are expected to arrive next year.

Ice Lake (which is already around in new notebooks, like Microsoft’s freshly revealed Surface Pro 7) runs with Gen11 (Iris Plus Graphics) and Intel’s slides at IDC showed its performance is an impressive boost over previous-gen UHD 620 integrated graphics.

Gen11 allows a game such as Rocket League to run at close to 60 fps, but the likes of Fortnite or Dirt Rally 2.0 are more like 40 to 45 fps (still playable, but it’s that 60 fps threshold which is widely regarded as smooth gaming).

And according to Intel’s presentation info, Tiger Lake’s integrated Gen12 graphics make that jump to 60 fps at 1080p resolution. Kenichiro Yasu, director of Intel technology headquarters, asserted that Gen12 offers double the performance compared to Gen11, and that Intel is firmly targeting 60 fps.

Affordable gaming laptops

So that’s obviously great news for those who can’t afford a fully-fledged gaming laptop with a discrete GPU, and rely on integrated graphics, yet still want to play some midrange games with a good deal of fluidity (and maybe even manage some more demanding titles with the details turned down at a solid enough frame-rate).

As mentioned, these Tiger Lake chips should be out in 2020, and the company also again reaffirmed that standalone Intel Xe graphics cards will also be launching next year.

In terms of the latter, an Intel exec recently hinted on Twitter that Xe graphics cards are scheduled to arrive in June 2020 (although it was a rather cryptic tweet – although Intel has something of a history of these). Of course, even if that is Intel’s intention for a planned launch date, things might yet slip…

Via Wccftech

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).