Intel Discrete GPU Codenamed Arctic Sound Will Have Gaming Variant, Landing in 2020

[humbug]

Should help introduce more people to FreeSync monitors if Intel has any success, two hopefully competitive choices - AMD or Intel.

I don't want to be fannying around wasting money buying different adaptive sync technology monitors when new cards are released. Once I've bought my FreeSync monitor that will be it, either an AMD or Intel GPU.

I'm in with that.

 

[subbytna]

Microsoft also, with the Xbone.

Am I the only one that keeps reading that as "ex-bone" ?

 

[Beren]

Nope you are not alone - I have always been waiting for the Xbone Black edition.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Intel Xe GPU Supports Ray Tracing Through Hardware

https://wccftech.com/intel-xe-gpu-supports-ray-tracing/

 

[Kelt]

I don't like to cheer for Intel, but here's hoping they bring some much needed competition to Nvidia.

Can't see AMD doing it for the foreseeable, unfortunately.

 

[D.P.]

Intel Xe GPU Supports Ray Tracing Through Hardware

https://wccftech.com/intel-xe-gpu-supports-ray-tracing/

Actually, reading through what Microsoft said they aren't providing hardware acceleration at all but are porting existing software emulation https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/int...xe-architecture/?spredfast-trk-id=sf211970281

By tapping the parallelism of Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® AVX2 and AVX-512 vector instructions, as much as 2x shading performance improvements have been seen on Pixar scenes.

They will be porting that code to the run on the XE's shaders

 

[Rroff]

That sounds suspiciously like what they did with Larrabee which wasn't exactly a resounding success.

 

[Grim5]

Their XE gpu is going to run AVX2 instructions or, I'm confused by the statement

 

[D.P.]

That sounds suspiciously like what they did with Larrabee which wasn't exactly a resounding success.

Exactly, and I think this is the fairly clear approach intel is taking. They absolutely want a powerful HPC and deep learning accelerator so the Xe will take the "general purpose" part of GPGPU to the extreme.

I have my doubts that they can pull this off. What helps is that every year games become more compute limited and rasterization is less important. This would be esepcially true if ray-tracing sees a big up-take. But if Intel don;t make dedicated RT hardware then their performance will also be lacklustre.

 

[D.P.]

Their XE gpu is going to run AVX2 instructions or, I'm confused by the statement

That seems to be what the intel article suggests. SO there will be relatively little improvement in dedicated graphics IP with a focus on doing most work in software