Intel employee claims first discrete gaming GPU is ‘right around the corner’

Intel’s first discrete graphics card made for gamers could be coming soon, according to a hint posted by an Intel employee.

Pete Brubaker, game development relations specialist at Intel, tweeted a new job listing at Intel that points to an upcoming release of the DG2. The position is for a Senior Game Developer Relations Engineer, who will partner with game developers around the world to help shape the technology that enables video games.

Although the job listing doesn’t explicitly state it, Brubaker’s tweet makes things clear: Intel is entering the enthusiast PC gaming space, and it’s entering that space soon.

Come work with us at Intel! DG2 is right around the corner, it's about to get exciting.https://t.co/qKjzlcsXmK

— Pete Brubaker (@pbrubaker) May 6, 2021

The DG2 family of graphics cards will reportedly compete with the best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and although we’ve known for a while that the range is coming in 2021, Brubaker’s tweet suggests the launch may be closer than we expected.

The most recent rumors claim that the Xe HPG discrete graphics card will support ray tracing and a supersampling technique similar to Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). With the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X supporting ray tracing, as well as the latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, that seems like a must-have feature if Intel is serious about competing with the top dogs. A DLSS-like feature would put Intel at a competitive advantage, though, as AMD continues to hold off on releasing its Super Resolution feature.

A leak from April showed that the Xe HPG graphics card will be based on a 6nm manufacturing process, which should offer a boost to performance with lower power requirements compared to the 8nm process in the RTX 3080. The leak puts performance of the flagship card between an RTX 3070 and 3080. The card will allegedly come with 16GB of GDDR6 video memory, a clock speed of 2.2GHz, and a TDP of 275W.

Those specs make sense. Former Intel CEO Bob Swan said that “this product will take our discrete graphics capability up the stack into the enthusiast segment.” Intel’s Xe range of graphics solutions has been impressive so far, with 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors offering unmatched gaming performance on integrated graphics. DG2 is targeting the highly competitive enthusiast crowd, however.

If the leaks and rumors are true, Intel may show up as a major force in the GPU market. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long. Despite rumors that DG2 could be delayed to 2022 or even beyond, a launch of Intel’s first gaming graphics card could be coming sooner than we thought.