It has been more than 20 years since Intel launched its latest desktop graphics card, the Intel740, however from yesterday the company officially returns to the discreet GPU game.
Intel has partnered with Asus and some other graphics card partners to launch their Iris Xe desktop GPUs for system developers who want to include the new card in their predefined PCs. The cards they look very different from the prototype Intel was presented at CES 2020, especially those provided by the manufacturers different from Asus.
These new letters, originally codenamed DG1, they are part of Intel’s Iris Xe family of graphics, which power 11th-generation Tiger Lake processors. The company plans to launch several desktop solutions for a while, but Intel is still working on its Xe-HPG architecture, which will drive the company’s future gaming GPUs and ideally rival Nvidia and AMD.
TThe cards Intel just released are not your quality GPUs for Nvidia and AMD games. Intel says these Iris Xe desktop cards were designed to add value Desktop PC “enhanced graphics, screen, and media acceleration capabilities. ”And the list of specifications seems to suggest just that: three display outputs; hardware decoding and video encoding acceleration, including AV1 decoding support; Show HDR support capabilities and artificial intelligence; and 80 execution units (EU) and 4 GB video memory.
In other words, these new GPUs seem more targeted desktops focused on business or education. (Dell is the first company that comes to mind.) Intel previously said that its Xe graphics will have up to 96 UE, so these desktop GPUs could be the last stop Intel has to make before launching your game-focused cards.
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Last summer, Intel confirmed that its gaming-level GPUs will have hardware-accelerated ray tracing. At CES 2021 the company said he was working on a road to enable both integrated and discreteyou have graphics at the same time on computers, which would allow users to maximize the discrete GPU for gaming and download other tasks such as streaming and recording to the integrated GPU. It also works with Nvidia to implement Resizable BAR in Nvidia Intel CPU / GPU combinations, so that users can get an increase in the frame rate of certain games.
But if Intel is working on this with Nvidia, it could make its CPUs and GPUs talk too, like AMD’s smart access memory. CoIt is combined with simultaneously harnessing the power of a discrete and integrated GPU, not to mention the ray tracing makes a compelling case for Intel to compete with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. in the meantimetime, the performance of these DG1 cards as part of a complete system could very well set the expectations of Intel gaming GPUs.