In a rather surprising move, a game developer has listed Intel's yet-to-be released Xe-HPG graphics processor. One of Intel's Xe-HPG GPU is claimed to be a recommended graphics card for Amnesia: Rebirth. Whether this is a typo isn't clear — maybe the game just mean Xe Graphics in general. Still, it could be a broader attempt at marketing the Xe-HPG brand.
Frictional Games's Amnesia Rebirth is a horror adventure first-person shooter game that recommends a system based on AMD's Ryzen 5 or Intel's Core i5 processor paired with 8 GB of RAM, and a graphics card based on AMD's Radeon RX 580, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680, or Intel's Xe-HPG GPU. Meanwhile, the minimum system requirements list a Core i3 processor with Intel's UHD Graphics 630.
Intel's Xe-HPG architecture will power the company's upcoming lineup of dedicated graphics processors designed specifically for gamers. The GPUs will use select energy-efficient blocks from the Xe-LP architecture, frequency optimizations designed for Xe-HP/Xe-HPC GPUs for datacenters and supercomputers, high-performance internal interconnections, hardware-accelerated ray-tracing support, and a GDDR6-powered memory subsystem. Intel plans to make its Xe-HPG-based GPUs available sometime in 2021, and they'll hopefully be competitive against mid-range and enthusiast-grade offerings from AMD and Nvidia.
Intel announced its Xe-HPG this past August, but did not say whether it had taped out the first GPUs based on the architecture or not. Based on the ray tracing support, we assumed that hardware was not yet at that level of development. It's also unclear how many Xe-HPG graphics processors Intel plans to launch next year.
The listing of Intel's Xe-HPG GPU may indicate that Intel has either supplied the very first samples of its Xe-HPG graphics cards to a game developer, or at least started to communicate levels of performance to be expected from its new entry-level gaming GPU.
AMD's Radeon RX 580 graphics card is based on the company's Ellesemere XT/Polaris 20 XT GPU originally introduced in 2016. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680 is the company's flagship graphics processor from 2012. By today's standards, performance of both solutions is at best mid-range, bordering on entry-level. The listing of one of Intel's Xe-HPG GPU next to rather outdated GPUs from AMD and Nvidia may indicate approximate performance level of an entry-level graphics card based on the Intel Xe-HPG architecture. Or it might simply be for the new Iris Xe Graphics that are shipping in Tiger Lake.
At this point any guesses about performance of Intel's Xe-HPG GPUs are of course speculation. The game developer could simply have listed the slowest graphics cards it had in mind. Yet, if Intel's slowest Xe-HPG GPU offers performance of AMD's Radeon RX 580 and the highest-end one is competitive with AMD's flagship 2021 offering, then Intel's Xe-HPG family will be pretty broad.
Intel traditionally does not comment on unofficial information about performance of its upcoming GPUs.
Source: Steam (via Wccftech.com)
