Intel launches its first desktop graphics cards in 20 years

It’s been more than 20 years since Intel released its latest desktop graphics card, the Intel740, but since yesterday the company is officially back in the discrete GPU game.

Intel has teamed up with Asus and a few other graphics card partners to launch its Iris Xe desktop GPUs for system builders who want to include the new card in their prebuilt PCs. The cards looks very different from the prototype Intel showed up at CES 2020, especially those supplied by the manufacturers other than Asus.

These new cards, initially named DG1, are part of the Intel Iris Xe graphics family, which powers the 11th generation Tiger Lake processors. The company has been planning to release multiple desktop solutions for some time, 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 grade GPUs like Nvidia and AMD. Intel says these Iris Xe desktop cards were designed to deliver value Desktop PC “graphics, display, and media acceleration capabilities. And the spec list seems to suggest exactly that.: three display outputs; hardware video decoding and encoding acceleration, including support for AV1 decoding; Show HDR support and artificial intelligence capabilities; and 80 execution units (EU) and 4 GB of video memory.

In other words, these new GPUs seem more targeted towards desktop computers for business or education. (Dell is the first company that comes to mind.) Intel previously said its Xe graphics will hold up to 96 EUs, so these desktop GPUs could be the last stop Intel needs to make before releasing its cards. game-oriented.

Last summer, Intel confirmed that its game-grade GPUs will feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing. At CES 2021, the company said he was working on a way to allow both integrated and discreetgraphics at the same time on PC, which would allow users to maximize the discrete GPU for gaming and offload other tasks like streaming and recording to the integrated GPU. It’s also working with Nvidia to implement the resizable bar on Intel CPU / Nvidia GPU combos, so users can get a frame rate boost from certain games.

But if Intel works on this with Nvidia, they could potentially make their processors and GPUs talk to each other as well, just like AMD’s Smart Access memory. Cocombined with simultaneously harnessing the power of a discrete and integrated GPU, not to mention ray tracing, which is a compelling argument for Intel to compete with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. In the averageHowever, the performance of these DG1 cards as part of a complete system could very well define the expectations of Intel’s gaming GPUs.