What you need to know
- Intel's gaming graphics card is set to ship in 2021.
- Intel introduced its Xe-HPG microarchitecture, which supports accelerated ray tracing.
- Intel also announced that its first Xe-based discrete GPU should ship in 2020.
Intel's gaming graphics card is set to ship next year. Intel announced Xe-HPG today, a gaming-optimized microarchitecture which scales well and should deliver good performance per dollar. Xe-HPG is expected to start shipping sometime in 2021. That microarchitecture allows Intel to deliver gaming cards with accelerated ray tracing support.
The news came during Intel's Architecture Day 2020, which shared several interesting bits of information as part of a presentation. The presentation gives us a better roadmap of Intel's upcoming plans regarding its chips, architecture, AI, and more. In addition to breaking down its next generation of architecture, Willow Cove, Intel discussed its Xe architecture.
A snippet of Intel's summary of the new microarchitecture summarizes how it works:
Xe-HPG, a gaming-optimized microarchitecture, combining good performance-per-watt building blocks from Xe-LP, leveraging the scale from Xe-HP for a bigger configuration and compute frequency optimization from Xe-HPC.
The technology utilizes a new memory subsystem that's based on GDDR6, which improves performance per dollar.
Xe-HPG will support accelerated ray tracing, which is increasingly important as more people move to systems that support ray tracing.
In addition to announcing Xe-HPG, Intel announced that its first Xe-based discrete GPU, which is code-named DG1, is currently in production. Intel states that it's on track to ship in 2020. Check out our top picks for best graphics card in the meantime.
