Intel's upcoming high-performance desktop graphics card, the DG2, will rival AMD's latest RDNA 2 GPU in raw graphics processing power, with up to 512 execution units. This is an exciting, though not fully confirmed, implication of the device ID entry in Intel's latest graphics driver dump.

Previous rumors about Intel's new GPUs have indicated modest EU counts of 128 to 384. However, as discovered by Videocardz.com, Intel's latest 100.9126 GPU driver has device ID entries indicating two variants of the new DG2 card, a high-performance version of Intel's latest Xe graphics architecture.

The two entries read "DG2 128 SKU" and "DG2 512 SKU" respectively, clearly implying the 128 EU and 512 EU variants of the new GPU. If accurate, the 512 EU variant should offer roughly the same raw graphics shader power as AMD's latest Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, although it lags somewhat behind Nvidia's Ampere chips.

Intel's Xe architecture is already known in the form of the DG1, a discrete GPU designed for thin and light laptops. It is also the basis for the integrated graphics in Intel's Tiger Lake CPUs.

DG1 offers 96 execution units running at 1,650 MHz and fits into a TDP of 25 watts, all enabled by Intel's 10nm manufacturing node DG1 is claimed to have about 2.5 TFLOPs of FP32 computing power. This is a clear reference point for the 512EU version of DG2.

Intel has already stated that DG2 will be manufactured at a third-party manufacturing node, likely TSMC's 7nm or 6nm node, and given that DG1 is intended for power- and heat-constrained laptops, it is reasonable to assume that the desktop DG2 board will be clocked considerably higher. It is reasonable to assume that the DG2 board for desktops will have a much higher clock.

Given the 512 EUs and higher clock, DG2 appears to offer raw graphics processing power comparable to AMD's latest Navi chip; assuming a 30% higher clock than DG1, a DG2 board with 17 TFLOPS is obtained. Clocking this up by 50% would give the DG2 about 20TFLOPS. This is roughly the same figure AMD claims for the Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Of course, raw shader power is far from a clear guide to actual game performance. After all, Nvidia claims that the GeForce RTX 3090 is capable of over 35TFLOPs of FP32 throughput, which represents an entirely unrealistic performance advantage over AMD's best GPUs. There is much more to real in-game frame rates than pure throughput as measured in TFLOPs.

However, the fact that Intel's DG2 appears to be in about the right range in raw shader power is certainly promising. This latest information is also consistent with earlier rumors that the DG2 may offer performance nearly on par with Nvidia's RTX 3070 boards; with the supply of new GPUs from AMD and Nvidia very tight and pricing increasingly out of control, a third entry into the market is a good thing only good.

In short, Intel's Xe graphics need not be the absolute fastest to have a very positive impact on the overall market. More choices and lower prices are indeed welcome.