Check out this skinny Intel Tiger Lake notebook running BF5 at over 30fps and 1080p

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Intel's Xe silicon shows gaming without a discrete GPU keeps getting better and better.

Intel Tiger Lake
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel has shown off a Tiger Lake thin-and-light laptop running Battlefield V at 1080p and at over 30fps, on nominally 'High' graphics presets. That's a pretty impressive effort from the Intel Xe GPU baked into the upcoming Tiger Lake mobile chips, and should mean getting a decent level of gaming performance out of your skinny work notebook might actually be possible with this new generation of 10nm chips.

The Tiger Lake prototype laptop was previewed by chief performance strategist, and reformed tech journalist, Ryan Shrout, on Twitter. He dives into the single player campaign of BFV, and shows the options settings of the game to highlight it running at 1080p and with the 'High' preset enabled.

You can also tell that it's running under the DirectX 11 API, rather than DirectX 12, but that's no real loss unless you're after some first-gen ray tracing action (which the Intel Xe definitely isn't capable of), and will generally offer more reliable performance anyway.

Shrout doesn't go into any depth as to what the specs are of either the laptop or the Tiger lake CPU, so we don't know how many execution units (EUs) this particular integrated Xe graphics chip is going to have inside it, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't the top chip. 

While topping 30fps at 1080p is an impressive achievement for such a thin-and-light machine it is worth pointing out there a few caveats to this demonstrated performance. For one, the single-player campaign in Battlefield V is notably lighter on system resources than the multiplayer maps, and there's a good chance it was dynamically scaling the quality settings because of the GPU memory allocation of the Tiger Lake silicon.

The 'GPU memory restriction' feature is clearly enabled in the video, which allows the game to adjust the textures, lighting, and effects settings based on how much video memory is available to it. If there's 4GB or more then it will happily sit at the High preset, however, if there is only 2.5GB or 1.5GB then Battlefield's Frostbite engine will scale back to Medium and Low respectively.

Caveats aside, the competing top AMD mobile chip, the Ryzen 9 4900HS reportedly hits around 25fps on the same settings, so it still looks like it could be a bit of a win for the 10nm Tiger Lake integrated chip compared to the 7nm Ryzen.

Dave James
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.