MARCH 2021 PCWorld 27desktop PCs as the developer-only DG1
graphics card (go.pcworld.com/wdg1) at
CES 2020. Intel created the desktop DG1 to
help developers get their feet wet in making
applications and games for Intel’s upcoming
(and hopefully more powerful) Xe GPUs.
Intel said it and “its partners saw the
opportunity to better serve the high-volume,
value-desktop market with improved graphics,
display and media acceleration capabilities.”
The company said two partners will sell
the cards to system integrators, one of which
is Asus. The final card (shown opposite) is
much less complicated than the DG1
developer version, which was actually fairly
attractive with its aluminum shroud.
Intel doesn’t push Iris Xe as a gaming
card, but the company has shown the Iris Xe
Max duking it out with the lowly Nvidia
GeForce MX350. The Iris Xe Max in laptops
features 96 execution units while the desktop
Iris Xe will step down to 80 EUs, so gaming
expectations need to be tuned.
It’s the GPU’s other features that could
shine brighter. Intel’s Hyper Encoding, for
example, would take advantage of
multiple encoders in the Iris Xe
and, say, your 11th-gen Core
CPU with integrated Iris Xe
graphics (go.pcworld.com/
rlks) to outperform a much
faster gaming GPU at
encoding. Intel’s Deep
Link concept would use
the combined AI of an Iris Xe and an 11th-gen
CPU as well.
The card also supports AV1 decode, a
relatively new feature found only in the latest
GeForce and Radeon GPUs as well as Intel’s
11th-gen laptop CPUs. Iris Xe graphics cards
will feature 4GB of RAM but the type is
unknown. The mobile version runs LPDDR4X
but the original DG1 developer cards were
said to have GDDR6.
As the DG1 is a standard PCIe graphics
card, we had hopes that it could be used as a
way to enable access to Intel’s QuickSync or
DP4a support on any desktop—perhaps as a
secondary accelerator on a Xeon-, Core X-, or
even Ryzen-based system. Unfortunately, Intel
says for a DG1 to work, it will need a B460,
H410, B365, or H310C chipset as well as a
BIOS that enables support and will be paired
with 9th-gen and 10th-gen parts.
To be honest, that makes the utility of the
DG1 actually even less useful for someone
looking for a GPU—but for a mainstream
business box it’s probably fine. At this point,
we have more questions than answers.