Intel's discrete Xe GPU for gamers is coming in 2021

 

Intel is making a big splash in the graphics world this year with its Xe GPU, which will show up in Tiger Lake laptops and will soon be available for high performance (HPC) machines. But what about gamers? It turns out, they’ll have to wait until 2021, the company revealed during its Architecture Day briefings this week. Intel is labeling its gamer-focused architecture Xe-HPG, and it’ll feature hardware accelerated ray tracing and support for GDDR6 memory. Beyond that, though, the company is staying mum.

The gaming GPU, which will be available as an external video card, joins Intel’s existing Xe-LP (low power) graphics for laptops, Xe-HP for datacenters and Xe-HPC for creators. Developers can also nab the Xe-LP GPU in the DG1 card later this year. The company says Xe-HPG will build on everything it’s developing this year: It’ll have the compute efficiency of the HPC hardware, the scalability of its datacenter graphics and the graphics efficiency of its laptop GPU. But of course, the real test will be to see how it performs against AMD and NVIDIA’s GPUs, which dominate the computing landscape.