Intel’s first PC gaming graphics card is now circulating among developers.
The company mentioned the news in a presentation at the International Supercomputing Conference on Monday. The upcoming card, codenamed DG2, is now “sampling,” meaning the pre-production models are in the hands of manufacturers and possibly game developers.
The sampling also signals a product launch could be on the horizon. On Monday, an Intel Twitter account also teased DG2’s arrival by linking to a web page early supporters of Intel’s graphics business can use to receive merchandise.
The same web page also notes: “We are soon heading toward a milestone moment, the pending release of the Xe HPG microarchitecture from Intel.”
The resulting product is set to arrive under Intel’s Xe HPG brand, which stands for high-performance gaming. The company has previously said the first Xe HPG card will land some time this year.
To produce the card’s GPU chip, Intel is tapping an external semiconductor foundry, possibly TSMC, the same manufacturer behind AMD’s Radeon graphics card. However, it remains unclear whether DG2 will span both laptops and desktops. But Intel’s Xe HPG plan is to build gaming graphics cards “up and down the stack.”
In January, Intel launched the DG1, a dedicated PC graphics card for desktops. However, the product didn’t target gamers as a standalone component. Instead, it arrived as an add-in card meant for mainstream consumers and small and medium businesses that PC makers could bundle inside their prebuilt desktop rigs.
CyberPowerPC eventually began installing the DG1 through a $749 prebuilt desktop, which is available on Best Buy. However, the graphics card itself features gaming performance comparable to a low-end $100 Nvidia GT 1030 card, according to Gamers Nexus. So we’re hoping the DG2 will pack a much bigger punch, and become a viable alternative to AMD’s and Nvidia’s gaming graphics cards.
