Which is not to say the DG1 had a strong showing at all. Besides generally weak performance relative to even budget GPUs, we did encounter some bugs and rendering issues in a few games.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla would frequently fade to white and show blockiness and pixelization. Here's a
video of the 720p Valhalla benchmark, and the game failed to run entirely at 1080p medium on the DG1. Another major problem we encountered was with
Horizon Zero Dawn, where
fullscreen rendering failed but the game could
run in windowed mode okay (but not borderless window either). Not surprisingly, both of those games are DX12-only, and we encountered other DX12 issues.
Fortnite would automatically revert to DX11 mode when we tried to switch, and
Metro Exodus and
Shadow of the Tomb Raider both crashed when we tried to run them in DX12 mode.
Dirt 5 also gave low VRAM warnings, even at 720p low, but otherwise ran okay.
DirectX 12 on Intel GPUs has another problem potential users should be aware of: sometimes excessively long shader compilation times. The first time you run a DX12 game on a specific GPU, and each time after swapping GPUs, many games will precompile the DX12 shaders for that specific GPU.
Horizon Zero Dawn as an example takes about three to five minutes to compile the shaders on most graphics cards, but thankfully that's only on the first run. (You can skip it, but then load times will just get longer as the shaders need to be compiled then rather than up front.) The DG1 for whatever reason takes a virtual eternity to compile shaders on some games — close to 30 minutes for
Horizon Zero Dawn. Hopefully that's just another driver bug that needs to be squashed, but we've seen this behavior with other Intel Graphics solutions in the past, and
HZD likely isn't the sole culprit.