Intel's Gen11 Architecture Presentation and Slides Posted

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel released the finer details of its Gen11 graphics architecture at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) and simultaneously posted a whitepaper outlining the new architecture to its site, all with little fanfare.

We took an in-depth look at the information in the architecture whitepaper, but now the GDC Vault has posted the full video and slides from Intel's presentation, which reveals many more details of the new architecture and may give us a hint of what to expect from Ice Lake in terms of memory speeds. 

Intel's new Gen11 graphics engine, which will make an appearance in nearly every mainstream Intel processor, purportedly delivers a dramatic performance improvement over the current Gen 9.5 graphics engine, with the goal of cramming one teraflop of 32-bit and two teraflops of 16-bit floating point performance into a low power envelope. Early indications are that the new Gen11 graphics provide a substantial boost to real-world performance.

We've included the slides in the album above, but you can access all of the slide decks from Intel's GDC presentations here.

The GDC Vault also has the full video of the presentation. Viewing videos on the GDC Vault usually requires an account that runs $550 per year, but luckily, you can view this video presentation for free. The presentation provides a nice deep dive on the new architecture and how it differs from the current generation. If you're interested in deep dive details, this video delivers.

One neat detail lies in the specs on the final slide: The Gen11 Graphics Architecture supports up to dual-channel DDR4-3733, perhaps hinting at future Ice Lake memory speeds. That would be a tremendous jump over today's DDR4-2933 support.

Intel's new Gen11 graphics engine serves as an intermediate generation before the company's Xe graphics architecture debuts, which includes both integrated and discrete graphics cards for gaming. You can see the bigger picture in our Intel Xe Graphics Card: Rumors, News, and Release Date article.

Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.