Technology company Intel has officially announced that it is preparing to work on a high-end gaming graphics card and promises to compete with leading graphics card developers AMD and Nvidia.
The company is preparing an Intel Xe graphics architecture for gaming called Xe-HPG, which was announced by Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Intel’s discrete graphics division Raja Koduri during the recent Architecture Day. It will be a new microarchitecture variant of Intel’s discrete graphics with low-power, big data chips, and feature real-time ray tracing acceleration. Yes, there will be three ray tracing gaming graphics cards in the near future.
The Intel Xe microarchitectures are as follows courtesy of PC Gamer:
- Xe-LP – Low-power GPU with up to 96 EUs. Launching within Intel Tiger Lake.
- Xe-HP – Intended for datacentre use, and scalable from single to four tile configurations. Launching 2021.
- Xe-HPG – The new gaming architecture. Expected to be scalable to beyond a single tile and will feature support for GDDR6. Launching 2021.
- Xe-HPC – Intended for use within supercomputers, such as the Aurora supercomputer planned for 2021.
This new Xe-HPG will take elements from the other three microarchitectures. It will have a good performance/watt from Xe-LP, the scale from Xe-HP for a bigger configuration, and the compute frequency optimization from the datacenter-grade Xe-HPC.
Since Intel confirmed that Xe-HP architecture will take on the tiled approach to function as a multicore GPU, it is speculated that it will be the same for Xe-HPG.
The press release provided stated that Xe-HP was demonstrated by Intel with transcoding of 10 full streams of high quality 4K video at 60 FPS on a single tile. Nothing is for certain yet on how that will be for gaming, but it does sound promising.
It is also confirmed that Intel will keep the costs to a minimum when it comes to gaming graphics cards. It will be launching the Xe-HPG with GDDR5 memory to ensure just that. Intel Xe will be first seen in Intel Tiger Lake processors, which will be released on Sept. 2. More details will be revealed later on.
Source: PC Gamer