Frictional Games’ new horror title, Amnesia: Rebirth recommends Intel’s Xe-HPG graphics cards, right alongside NVIDIA’s GTX 680 and the AMD’s Radeon RX 580 for optimal performance. This is a bit of a surprise as Intel hasn’t even announced the launch dates for the HPG graphics cards, nor do we know anything about their performance figures.
From what we know about Intel’s upcoming discrete graphics cards, the DG1 or the Iris Max will be the first one, packing the same GPU as the Tiger Lake-U flagship, albeit with more cache and a wider memory buffer. DG1 will be succeeded by DG2 which will likely feature up to 512 EUs or 4,096 cores and compete in the budget and mid-range segments.
It’s unclear whether DG2 will be part of the HPG lineup as the latter is expected to be fabbed on a third-party node (TSMC). Various rumors state different things about the HPG lineup, with some suggesting as many as 960 EUs or 7,680 shaders, but I find this a bit hard to believe. Intel’s iGPUs don’t scale as well as NVIDIA or AMD’s designs and a 960 EU part will likely be a power hog while offering less than expected performance.
Regardless, the HPG lineup paired with GDDR6 memory is expected to launch in 2021. It’s unclear whether they’ll support ray-tracing acceleration or not, but the chances are slim. Even if there is dedicated hardware for it, it’s bound to be less efficient than NVIDIA’s RT Cores.
