Intel is making a big splash in the graphics world this year with its Xe GPU, which will appear in Tiger Lake laptops and will soon be available for high-performance (HPC) machines. But what about gamers? It turns out they will have to wait until 2021, the company revealed during its introductions to Architecture Day this week. Intel marks the gamer-oriented architecture Xe-HPG, and it will have hardware-accelerated ray tracing and support for GDDR6 memory. Beyond that, however, the company remains mother.
Available as an external video card, the gaming GPU joins Intel’s existing Xe-LP (low power) graphics for laptops, Xe-HP for data centers and Xe-HPC for makers. Developers can upgrade the Xe-LP GPU to the DG1 card later this year. The company says Xe-HPG will build on everything it develops this year: it will have the calculated efficiency of the HPC hardware, the scalability of its data center graphics and the graphics efficiency of its laptop GPU. But of course, the real test will be to see how it performs against AMD and NVIDIA’s GPUs, which dominate the computer landscape.
