Intel Xe HPG gaming GPU: taking on AMD and Nvidia

Discrete Intel Xe HPG graphics cards will take on the best Nvidia and AMD have to offer in 2021.

The reveal of the Intel Xe HPG during Intel’s Architecture Day 2020 was part of a virtual firehose of information on a ton of upcoming products and technologies. One of the products we’re most interested in seeing and testing is Intel’s Xe Graphics.

Intel originally had plans for a single graphics architecture with two microarchitectures back in 2018. Two years later, the number of microarchitectures has doubled to four. Xe LP is for integrated graphics and entry-level solutions, Xe HP is for high-end compute and data centre workloads, and Xe HPC is basically Xe HP on steroids, targeting supercomputing exascale solutions. That leaves the fourth and final microarchitecture that Intel just announced: Intel Xe HPG, which will be the heart of the consumer card.

Given what we know of Xe HP, the bifurcation into two different parts makes a lot of sense. First, Xe HP of necessity has FP64 (64-bit floating point) support, along with tensor cores. These are common features in data centre compute, deep learning, and AI environments, but they’re also extra bloat that’s not needed for a gaming GPU. Second, Xe HP will use

HBM2e memory.

Intel Xe HPG will address both of these items by removing the FP64 support (or at least trimming it way down) and by adopting GDDR6 memory. That’s not the only change, however. Dumping FP64 (possibly tensor cores as well) and HBM gives Intel room to add in other features. Specifically, Intel confirmed that Xe HPG will support hardware ray tracing. That’s a critical move, considering the AMD Big Navi / RDNA 2 and Nvidia RTX 3080 Ampere will both arrive in the next month or two with ray tracing, and in November the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X will launch with AMD GPUs that also support the feature. Trying to break into the GPU market with a product that lacks features the established players support wouldn’t go over well.

The other major bombshell is that it plans to utilise a third party for fabrication of Xe HPG. That means it won’t have to use up its limited 10nm SuperFin capacity making gaming GPUs, and it will perhaps join AMD and Nvidia by using TSMC to manufacture Xe HPG.