Intel is preparing its Intel Xe graphics architecture for gaming, known as Xe-HPG, a new microarchitecture for Intel's discrete graphics announced today at Architecture Day by Raja Koduri variant, is positioned as a fusion of low-power chips and big data chips, and features real-time ray tracing acceleration.

After a year of mixed information about whether Intel would make a gaming chip with its next GPU architecture, it has been confirmed that it will make a gaming chip with Xe-HPG. The details of this architecture are not yet known, only how it relates to the known configurations of Intel Xe.

The Intel Xe microarchitecture is:

What we know so far about Xe-HPG is:

"superior performance/watt" of Xe-LP, "scale for larger configurations" of Xe-HP, and data center-grade Xe-HPC microarchitecture's "optimized compute frequency" will be blended. It is speculated that this means the possibility of multi-tile GPUs with more single Intel Xe GPU tiles stitched together.

Since Intel has confirmed that the Xe-HP architecture can function as a "multi-core GPU" using this tiling approach, the same could be said for some configurations of the Xe-HPG architecture.

"At Architecture Day, Intel demonstrated Xe-HP transcoding 10 full streams of high-quality 4K video at 60 FPS on a single tile," the company's press release states. How that translates to gaming performance, however, is still unclear. There are so many factors that must be taken into account before any accurate guesses can be made about shipping performance.

At the very least, we know that Intel has an eye for keeping costs down. GPUs for data centers can be quite expensive, while gaming GPUs are much more competitively priced. Intel plans to ship the Xe-HPG with GDDR6 memory to minimize costs.

Perhaps most surprising is that Intel feels it is well suited to integrate real-time ray tracing acceleration in its first foray into the discrete gaming GPU world. So far only Nvidia's RTX 20 series GPUs support acceleration in silicon, but the next generation Nvidia Ampere graphics cards, which will be detailed on September 1, are expected to offer improved ray tracing performance.

Similarly, AMD has confirmed support for the RDNA 2 architecture, which is expected to be available by the end of the year.

With Intel's announcement of dedicated gaming GPUs, 2021 will see a three-way battle for the gaming PC seat.

And all three appear to be manufactured on TSMC processes; Intel has confirmed that the Intel Xe-HPG will be manufactured using an outside foundry, and all signs point to TSMC. This is the same location that AMD and Nvidia currently use for their chips, although Nvidia is also rumored to use Samsung.

Prior to that, we will first see Intel Xe in the Intel Tiger Lake processors. These will launch on September 2, 2020 and will feature up to 96 EU and brand new 10nm SuperFin technology at the heart of Willow Cove.

With so many new products coming from Intel in the coming months, I must say that it is exciting to see Intel pushing a large number of new products onto the scene.