The integrated GPU solutions of the Intel brand haven't been too well performing in games. Only the Iris Pro iGPUs found in the high end Broadwell processors (e.g. i7-5775C) are truly a match for the AMD APUs. Even though the new HD 630 has some raw encoding horsepower under the hood we were unable to conduct proper tests to confirm this, so we have to come back on that matter as the CPU sample had to go back to Gigabyte. For now we can only highlight the gaming performance.

Like mentioned before AMD still has the upper hand here providing decent game performance at 1920x 1080 resolution, no matter the detail preset. Between the last Intel generations the performance improvements from the Intel HD 4600 (i7-4770K) were huge. Stepping up from Intel HD530 (Skylake) to Intel HD 630 is less phenomenal. Let us take a closer look:

Stock runs:

If we compare the HD 530 and the HD 630 purely on gaming performance, in Bioshock  we see hardly notice any improvement. Only the Iris Pro iGPU and the recent AMD APUs can run this game on Medium detail preset at 1080P. In Tomb Raider there's a small performance gain observed, Anyway the game looks pretty outdated in a Low detail configuration.

In the graphics test of Futuremark's Firestrike we notice the same tiny boost over the HD 530, though nothing Earth-shattering compared to the difference we got with the HD 4600 series and the HD 530 when reviewing Skylake.

iGPU Memory scaling:

The above stock runs were performed with the system memory running at 2133MHz. Since these iGPUs use the same system memory, faster memory should provide a boost in performance. DDR4 3000Mhz is pretty common nowadays and DDR4 3600MHz is already a bit more niche but might become a standard soon.

Both games benefit nicely when using faster system memory, especially at the low preset there's more headroom for lag free gaming, even Firestrike puts out a way higher score. Nevertheless if one intends to game on these iGPUs, lowering the resolution is the only viable path to take.

Memory allocation:

Since we couldn't overclock the iGPU on our Gigabyte  Z270 Gaming 7, the last option for us to test was the amount of allocated memory to the iGPU. To cut a long story short we went from 96MB to 256MB and saw hardly any changes in output. It might have a substantial effect when decoding, but for gaming purposes this BIOS feature seems pretty pointless.