INTEL’S FIRST GRAPHICS CARD

Basic, and original manufacturer only

AT LAST, we have Intel’s first discrete graphics card, the Iris Xe, carrying the DG1 GPU. Well almost. Intel has announced its partnership with “two ecosystem partners, including ASUS,” to bring its desktop GPU to specific pre-built systems (the other partner is Colorful, it’s no secret). The technical specifications lists 80 execution units, a maximum clock of 1,500MHz, a memory bandwidth of 68GB/s over a 128bit bus, and a maximum resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 over DisplayPort. Support includes DirectX 12.1, Vulcan, OpenGL 4.6, H.264, and H.265 hardware encode/decode.

This first step into the discreet graphics card market is a tentative one. The DG1 is basically a card version of the Iris Xe chip used in laptops, only slightly less powerful. Why start here? The idea is to sell older processors with poor integrated graphics to OEMs, and supply an economical graphics card to accompany it. These cards won’t even work with newer Intel processors. Initial tests put the new card roughly comparable with a GeForce GTX 950 Ti. We will have to wait for the DG2 to see something that will worry the gaming market. This promises up to 512 execution units, if information gleaned from the latest Xe driver is to be believed.

The graphics card business has been a two-horse race for so long it’s difficult to remember a time when the choice wasn’t between an Nvidia or AMD-powered card. There used to be dozens—remember 3dfx, or SGI, or S3, or Real3D? All gone. Even if Intel never effectively competes with the big-ticket cards it doesn’t matter. We get more cards, more stock, more choice.

However, we needn’t be so pessimistic. Intel has been planning this for a long time, and the whole Xe family has been designed to be scalable right up to supercomputers. Raja Koduri, Intel’s graphics chief, teased us with die shots of the Xe HPC (designed for datacenters) showing two GPUs, with multiple HBM modules. It could get fun.