It was more than 20 years after Intel released its last desktop graphics card, Intel740, but since yesterday the company has officially returned to the discrete GPU game.
Intel has joined Asus and several other graphics card partners to launch Iris Xe desktop GPUs for system builders who want to include the new board in their pre-built computers. The books looks much different from the prototype Intel was presented at CES 2020, especially those provided by the manufacturerother than Asus.
These new books, originally called DG1, are part of the Intel Iris Xe graphics family, which powers 11th-generation Tiger Lake processors. The company has been planning for a while to launch more desktop solutions, but Intel is still working on its Xe-HPG architecture, which will power the company’s future gaming GPUs and ideally compete with Nvidia and AMD.
TThe cards Intel just released aren’t your gaming GPUs like Nvidia and AMD. Intel says these Iris Xe desktop cards were designed to add value desktop computers’ improved graphics, display, and media acceleration capabilities. “And the list of specifications seems to suggest exactly that: three display outputs; video decoding and hardware encoding acceleration, including support for AV1 decoding; Display HDR support and artificial intelligence capabilities; and 80 execution units (EU) and 4 GB video memory.
In other words, these new GPUs seem to be more geared towards Business or education-oriented desktop PCs. (Dell is the first company that comes to mind.) Intel previously said that Xe graphics will have up to 96 EU, so these desktop GPUs could be the last stop Intel needs to make before launching its game-oriented cards.
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Last summer, Intel confirmed that its gaming-level GPUs will have hardware-accelerated ray tracking. At CES 2021 the company said he was working on a way to allows both integrated and discretegraphics you at the same time on PCs, which would allow users to maximize the discrete gaming GPU and download other tasks such as streaming and recording to the integrated GPU. It is also working with Nvidia to implement Resizable BAR on Intel CPU / Nvidia GPU combos, so that users can get an increase in the frame rate in certain games.
But if Intel works on this with Nvidia, it could make their processors and GPUs talk as well, as does AMD’s smart access memory. CoCombined with the simultaneous use of the power of a discrete and integrated GPU, not to mention ray tracing, this makes a compelling case for Intel to compete with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Averagetime, how powerful these DG1 cards are as part of a complete system could very well set expectations for Intel gaming GPUs.