While we have already had a small taste of what Intel’s Xe cards will look like during CES 2020, we still don’t know all the details of these cards, or even what a flagship model would look like.
Recently, a leaked document from earlier on in 2019 has arisen which seems to offer up some hints on what we could see in the future. While this information might be a little out of date now and Intel’s plans may even have changed, they still make for an interesting read.
What Do The Leaks Show?
Tech website Digital Trends obtained parts of one of Intel’s internal presentations where they featured the Intel Xe card. A chart on the slides showed seven different graphics cards with three listed as RVP (reference validation platform) and four listed as SVD (software development vehicle).
One of the SVD cards we have seen already was the Intel Xe DG1 which made its debut at CES 2020, but this leaves the rest of the cards as a bit of a mystery. The cards range from one-tile cards with TDPs from 75W to 150W, two-tile cards with 300W TDPs and four-tile cards with a TDP of either 400W or 500W.
Digital Trends has also speculated that each tile on each graphics card could contain 128 EUs, resulting in the four-tile model having a total of 512 EUs.
What Does This Power Mean?
While this is a massive step up from anything Nvidia or AMD currently requires for any of their graphics cards, we don’t necessarily know if this will directly translate to performance. With the card we saw at CES likely to be a lower power, one-tile unit, we could hope for four times the performance on the higher cards.
At CES 2020, we saw the Intel Xe DG1 achieve around 40-50 FPS when running Destiny 2 at 1080p at the lowest settings. While potentially quadrupling the performance might not result in four times the FPS, it could allow for smoother gameplay at higher resolutions and a bump to the graphics.
Final Word
While these plans might well have changed over the course of the year, it’ll be interesting to see if people will opt for a higher power drawing card when there are plenty of alternatives that achieve better results while being less power-hungry.
We may not even see the higher-tile cards released to consumers, these cards may just be for development purposes only. It’s probably going to be a little while longer before we hear more details on Intel’s graphics cards, that is unless we get some more leaks.
If we hear any more news we’ll be sure to let you know. With a couple more events coming up in the future, we may have some more information for you in the future. Until then, keep checking back for all the latest news.