Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Intel teases new dedicated graphics card slated for 2020 release

Jon Martindale
By
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Intel is looking to make the dedicated graphics market a three-horse race within the next couple of years. It teased a brand-new graphics card at the Siggraph 2018 show, where it announced plans to “set [its] graphics free.” A silhouette of a full-size graphics card completed the hint at future potential and has PC users cautiously excited about what it all might mean for the industry.

Although the graphics card market in the 1990s was contested by a number of companies offering competing architectures, the only two industry giants who survived those wars were Nvidia and AMD. Since the turn of the century they’ve been the only two graphics card companies that have really mattered in the gaming space, and even then, AMD has often played a distant second-fiddle. Intel has always had its place in graphics with its Intel HD onboard solutions offered in almost all of its CPUs, but 2020 could see it introduce its first dedicated graphics card in decades.

Recommended Videos

We will set our graphics free. #SIGGRAPH2018 pic.twitter.com/vAoSe4WgZX

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 15, 2018

Related

Intel confirmed it was working on a graphics card earlier this year, highlighting at the time that there was a very good reason it had hired Raj Koduri, ex-head of AMD’s Radeon graphics division, to aid in its development. Koduri is currently the chief architect, senior vice president, and general manager of Intel’s Core and Visual Computing Group.

The announcement and the subsequent tweet embedded above give us precious little additional detail, but do suggest Intel is putting a lot of its manufacturing and marketing muscle behind the project. It makes the claim that the project will “set our graphics free,” which is a relatively hyperbolic comment, but the fact that it follows it up by saying that this is “just the beginning,” suggests that Intel may be making a permanent move into the GPU development and manufacturing market.

Considering companies like Nvidia seem poised to refocus their efforts on A.I., automation, and machine learning, that’s exciting news for gamers who have suffered under pricing and availability issues for the best part of a year and a half.

Although it has technically been 20 years since Intel’s last graphics card, it has worked on dedicated graphics hardware in the intervening years. Project Larabee was an ambitious design which ultimately turned into a multicore co-processor rather than a graphics card, but did offer impressive enough performance to find its way into supercomputers.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
AMD has a lot to prove this year
Dr. Lisa Su at the RX 7900 XT launch event.

AMD has clawed its way up from many disasters. Always chasing Nvidia and Intel, the so-called Team Red stayed strong over the years and found its niche in the PC market, a niche that has seemingly worked well, especially over the past few years.

Despite these valiant efforts, this past year has made me worry about the future of AMD, and the beginning of the year so far has only confirmed some of my worries.
Processing the past

Read more
Intel may be throwing away an important opportunity
The backs of the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards.

However small Intel's presence might be when it comes to discrete graphics cards, it's still chipping away at Arc Battlemage -- but every time we hear of it, the news is strictly bad. This time, a new leak tells us that Intel may not even attempt to release Arc Battlemage for laptops, and even if it does, its partners may still not want to produce the acrds.

The grim update comes from Moore's Law Is Dead, who talked about Arc Battlemage in his latest video. According to the YouTuber's anonymous sources, Intel's next-gen discrete GPUs aren't coming to laptops. References to any mobile GPUs have reportedly been erased from an internal Intel document, indicating that the cards may have been scrapped, as opposed to never having been planned.

Read more
Intel claims up to 268% gaming boost with latest Arc graphics drivers
Two intel Arc graphics cards on a pink background.

Intel has released a new graphics driver update for its Arc lineup of GPUs. It is the company's first major update this year, primarily supporting new game titles like Enshrouded, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Tekken 8, and Palworld. As always, the new Game On drivers (31.0.101.5186) also ensure a substantial performance boost to many existing DirectX11 and DirectX12 games.

As per Intel, gamers can expect a massive increase of up to 268% average fps (frame per second) uplift in Just Cause 4 at 1080p with very high settings and about 160% average fps uplift in Just Cause 3 with similar settings. Popular titles like Tekken 8 (DX12) also witness up to 15% average fps uplift at 4K with ultra settings and up to 8% average fps uplift in The Last of Us Part 1 at 1080p with ultra settings.

Read more