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Intel Xe GPU Speculation

My expectation is that it won't match 3070 in gaming performance. Driver maturity will be an issue, NV/AMD have a couple of decades under their belts in terms of tuning drivers for high end gaming parts. I honestly think people are kidding themselves if they expect it to compete at that sort of level, as we get closer to launch people will be looking at the hardware and making interpolations that get people's hopes up, but if people have such high expectations I reckon they will be sorely disappointed when the benchmarks on launch drivers hit.

I hope I'm proven wrong but that's just how I see it, you look back historically and drivers have always held back challengers to NV/3dfx and AMD/ATI, i.e. PowerVR, S3, Matrox etc had some really interesting technology but let down by naff drivers or lack of adoption by developers. Admittedly the adoption of generic APIs like DX12/Vulkan should made things easier for developers but there might be some optimisations in there for NV/ATI that won't have been made for Intel day1.

What Intel need to do is target the lower midrange segment, where the big boys aren't offering much of late, price competitively (their size and manufacturing capability can help here) and grab market share. This will in term give them a platform to build on in terms of polishing the drivers ahead of future releases perhaps targeted more at the upper midrange.
 
$500 RTX 3070 mid 2022 and he thinks that's "very exciting"

Are any of you as excited as he is for a $500 RRP RTX 3070 in June 2022?


Given the current rumor of crazy 3070ti launch prices many of us might be, at least it might bring AMD/Nvidia prices down
 
My expectation is that it won't match 3070 in gaming performance. Driver maturity will be an issue, NV/AMD have a couple of decades under their belts in terms of tuning drivers for high end gaming parts. I honestly think people are kidding themselves if they expect it to compete at that sort of level, as we get closer to launch people will be looking at the hardware and making interpolations that get people's hopes up, but if people have such high expectations I reckon they will be sorely disappointed when the benchmarks on launch drivers hit.

I hope I'm proven wrong but that's just how I see it, you look back historically and drivers have always held back challengers to NV/3dfx and AMD/ATI, i.e. PowerVR, S3, Matrox etc had some really interesting technology but let down by naff drivers or lack of adoption by developers. Admittedly the adoption of generic APIs like DX12/Vulkan should made things easier for developers but there might be some optimisations in there for NV/ATI that won't have been made for Intel day1.

What Intel need to do is target the lower midrange segment, where the big boys aren't offering much of late, price competitively (their size and manufacturing capability can help here) and grab market share. This will in term give them a platform to build on in terms of polishing the drivers ahead of future releases perhaps targeted more at the upper midrange.

What we really need to know is have Intel poached any driver people? What they lack in experience can be bought. That's what I would do. I'd also get a programme going well in advance to liaise with developers. If they ever starting from scratch with no-one with any experience is be less confident but Raja knows the GPU industry. He also knows what it's like when it doesn't go smoothly. Given that and Intel's resources there should be no excuses.
 
I thought about that i.e. they can get people experienced at driver optimisation, however whether they can optimise as quickly/efficiently from day 1 for a completely new architecture at a different manufacturer, who knows.
 
I don't have as much faith in Raja as others seem to.

Always hard to say unless you worked with them. There may have just been a clash of personalities, creative differences, lack of resources whilst Ryzen was ramping up. Who knows? If he has issues a second time, that might be cause for thinking he's the common denominator ;)
 
Always hard to say unless you worked with them. There may have just been a clash of personalities, creative differences, lack of resources whilst Ryzen was ramping up. Who knows? If he has issues a second time, that might be cause for thinking he's the common denominator ;)

All i remember is Raja leaving, Mrs Sue taking over at RTG (who no longer exist BTW) and within moths relaunching their Vega based APU's with a 50% PPW increase and a 30% IPC increase.

I think Raja is capable, just not as capable as the guys Nvidia and AMD have.
 
Raja has previously stated he is committed to software as well as hardware, I would expect that Intel has plenty of software engineers, AMD teases at new tools to improve game development | TechRadar

Raja has also previously tweeted that now that Intel has made it's first discrete desktop GPU's he's learnt that the hardest thing about making a graphics card is not designing it and it's not even building it, it's having to write brand new drivers for it from scratch - because bad drivers can rob the gpu of a lot of performance.

And that's true, with the way technology works - GPU design doesn't stack ontop of what came before it so much - so building a powerful GPU that competes with existing companies like Nvidia and AMD isn't that difficult. But drivers on the other hand are a combination of years of development, testing and fixing and that is where the true challenge lies in being a new market entrant for graphics cards - how to catch up years and years of software developement
 
As mentioned earlier, Intel bringing their own fab capacity into the fray can potentially change the game massively.

Completely agree that the mid-low end is ripe for cleaning up if they can nail a cheap, "good enough" gpu.

Can't see them competing against anything north of 3070 performance, but if it's priced right I'll happily buy in.
 
Drivers will be intel's problem. Nvidia and co have been around through many years of gaming so will have kinks ironed out for old games and the like, intel will be focusing on new games so will likely have kinks/instability in older games. I be surprised if they on any kind of feature parity as well at launch, they will be playing catch up. But the market does need a 3rd player and as everyone has said the fab capacity should help things.
 
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