20 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020NEWS INTEL’S IRIS XE MAX GPU
In cases where Intel’s Deep Link-connected GPUs won’t benefit gamers, Intel says that its drivers will be
smart enough to adjust.Intel laid out a list of applications that can
take advantage of this behavior: HandBrake,
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Topaz
Gigapixel AI, xSplit, Huya, Joyy, Leela Chess 0
(Lc0), and Xiaohulu. Blender, CyberLink,
Fluendo, and Magix Software will arrive soon,
Moss said.
Moss also said that Intel hopes to ship a
proof of concept during the first half of 2021
for single-stream encoding. That will depend
on finalizing the implementation, then
sending it to FFMPEG (go.pcworld.com/
fmpg), the engine that HandBrake runs,
according to an Intel representative.
One interesting disclosure that Intel made
was admitting that there will be some
applications and games that do not run better
on a combined Tiger Lake/Iris Xe Max system,
and will see increased frame rates on the Tiger
Lake processor with its own integrated GPU. (Alarge part of this involves the latencies of going
back and forth between the two GPUs.) In this
case, Moss said, the system is smart enough to
confine the graphics workload to whichever
GPU is the most appropriate.
Based on Intel’s ongoing improvements,
you might think that all this is a work in
progress. Intel seems to feel that way, too.
McPhee called the Iris Xe Max a “very
strategically created part” that allows Intel to
develop the internal software that will allow
Intel to enter the discrete graphics market—
not with the Iris Xe Max (DG1), but the DG2.
It seems very likely that Intel will be
marketing its upcoming Xe-HPG part as a
package deal, taking advantage of the
combination of the CPU and GPU to inflate
its performance numbers relative to the
competition. How will it all play out? We
have about a year to find out.DELIVERING OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE