It is more than 20 years since Intel released its last desktop graphics card, the Intel740, but since yesterday the company is officially back in the discrete GPU game.
Intel worked with Asus and a few other graphics card partners to release the Iris Xe desktop GPUs for system builders who want to include the new card in their pre-built PCs. The cards look very different from the prototype Intel showed off at CES 2020, especially the ones provided by the manufacturers different from Asus.
These new cards, originally code-named DG1, are part of Intel’s Iris Xe graphics family, powering 11th generation Tiger Lake processors. The company has been planning to release multiple desktop solutions for a while, 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.
T.The cards that Intel just released aren’t your gaming-grade GPUs from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. Intel says these Iris Xe desktop cards are designed to deliver value desktop PCs “enhanced graphics, and media acceleration capabilities. And the specification list seems to suggest just that: three display outputs; hardware video decoding and encoding acceleration, including support for AV1 decoding; Display HDR support and artificial intelligence capabilities; and 80 execution units (EUs) and 4 GB of video memory.
In other words, these new GPUs seem to be more focused business or educational desktop PCs. (Dell is the first company that comes to mind.) Intel previously said its Xe graphics will have up to 96 EUs, so these desktop GPUs could be the last stop Intel should make before releasing its gaming-focused cards.
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Last summer, Intel confirmed that its gaming tier GPUs will have hardware-accelerated ray tracing. At CES 2021 the company said it was heading to enable both integrated and discreteto graphics at the same time on PCs, allowing users to maximize the discrete gaming GPU and transfer other tasks such as streaming and recording to the integrated GPU. It also partners with Nvidia to implement Resizable BAR on Intel CPU / Nvidia GPU combos, allowing users to get a frame rate boost from certain games.
But if Intel works on that with Nvidia, they may also be able to get their CPUs and GPUs to talk to each other, just like AMD’s Smart Access Memory. Cocombined with simultaneously harnessing the power of a discrete and integrated GPU, not to mention ray tracing, that calls for Intel to compete with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. In the meantimeHow well these DG1 cards perform as part of a complete system could very well set expectations for Intel’s gaming GPUs.