The Game Developers Conference leaves us with great news about video games, technologies, and finally hardware for games. So far it’s all about RayTracing, Gaming and Stadia, Google’s solution for cloud gaming. Intel gave a blow to the effect when he talked about his graphics cards. After the Intel Gen11, the iGPU for its Ice Lake processors turned into Intel Xe for desktop graphics. Graphics that promise to be revolutionary. At the GDC 2019, Intel had the chance to show some of the designs they have in mind for their special Xe graphics in 2019.
The two designs shown seem to belong to a mid-range model because of their small size, and one of them is based on the Cristiano Sequeira design we talked about a few months ago. These will be developed by Raja Koduri with the commitment to compete with NVIDIA for the high end and NVIDIA and AMD for the medium and low end.
This first design, based on the Sequeira concept, has an ITX design and a small fan in the back. In fact, this small blower is not very convincing, especially because of the noise problem. Anyway, it’s just a concept and not necessarily the end, so we’ll wait to analyze it and give our opinion.
The second design has a strange fan in the middle, but with many fins. It will be interesting to see if this model will be commercialized and how effective it is.
Intel Xe graphics will come in 2020, so we need to know more details, but it’s good to see some of the plans that have the new competitor in the GPU market.