WHAT ABOUT INTEL?
It’s easy to start thinking about graphics and ray-tracing GPUs as a two-pony show. There’s AMD on the one side and Nvidia on the other. But Intel doesn’t intend to be left out, or at least that’s what it claims.
For the past few years, Intel has been working its way toward releasing dedicated graphics cards. Headed by Raja Koduri, formerly of AMD’s GPU division, 2021 is the year when we’ll finally see the fruits of Intel’s labors. There will be multiple products, ranging from low-power integrated graphics solutions to high-end gaming cards, and all the way up to data center-focused parts for supercomputers. Xe LP already exists in the latest 11th-Gen Core mobile CPUs (AKA Tiger Lake), but the dedicated cards will be a different story.
How different? That’s the $20,000 question. Xe HPG stands for High Performance Graphics, and Intel should have a good idea of what it’s up against. It needs to go toe to toe with AMD and Nvidia if it’s going to succeed. That means more than just hardware, as drivers are important in modern graphics cards.
So far, Intel’s Xe LP Graphics have been impressive for 15-25W devices, but they’re nowhere near the level of performance offered by dedicated GPUs. Put more bluntly, GTX 1050 is faster, and that’s a three-year-old $110 GPU. What we don’t know yet is how Xe will scale up to 250-300W parts with far more computational power. We do know that Intel is planning on supporting ray tracing, both DXR and VulkanRT, with Xe HPG. Hopefully it will be fast and competitive rather than weak and late to the party.