Intel's first Xe graphics card is still on track for release in 2020

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Intel’s first Xe graphics card is still on track for release in 2020But the Big Navi and RTX competitors aren’t likely to arrive until next year.

But the Big Navi and RTX competitors aren’t likely to arrive until next year.

Intel have confirmed that their first discreteXe GPUis still on track to release before the end of 2020. Code-named DG1, the graphics card is currently in production and will begin shipping before the end of the year, just in time for an almighty showdown between the upcomingNvidia Amperecards and the next-generation ofBig NaviGPUs.

Xe-LP GPUs will contain up to 96 EUs, or execution units, according to Intel (which is their version of Nvidia’s CUDA cores and AMD’s Stream Processors), and will support a number of DirectX 12 features such as asynchronous compute (which allows it to perform graphics and compute workloads simultaneously), sampler feedback (which allows games to load into memory only the bits it needs for a particular scene) and view instancing (which is all to do with running shaders and rendering).

The second Xe architecture they revealed today wasXe-HP(standing for high power). The first Xe-HP chip “has been powered on and [is] back from the labs”, according to Intel, but it won’t be available until next year. Still, the key thing about Xe-HP is that it’s going to scalable, providing “data centre-class, rack-level media performance” in a range of different form factors and variants.

One such variant is theXe-HPG, which is Intel’s gaming optimised micro architecture. This is likely to be where Intel’s proper Nvidia and AMD gaming GPU competitors will originate from, as Intel says Xe-HPG will combine the performance per watt building blocks from their Xe-LP microarchitecture with the scale of Xe-HP to create a range of gaming-focused configurations.

Intel also confirmed that Xe-HPG will also have GDDR6 memory and accelerated ray tracing support, and that their first Xe-HPG GPUs are expected to start shipping sometime in 2021.

Alas, we still don’t know exactly when Intel’s Xe DG1 GPU will arrive before the end of the year, but it’s definitely one to watch.