Intel announces first Iris Xe desktop graphics cards

Intel Iris Xe desktop graphics cards are now being made and distributed by its board partners. Asus and Colorful have rustled up two very different looking designs based upon the Iris Xe (80 EUs), built on Intel's Xe-LP GPU architecture. These 25 to 30W PCIe 4.0 add-in-cards won't be distributed via retail channels but provided to OEMs and System Integrators designing systems for mainstream users and small- to medium-size businesses.

In their intended target PC builds Intel says that the Iris Xe discrete desktop graphics cards (previously code-named 'DG1') will facilitate several value adding improvements: triple display outputs; hardware video decode and encode acceleration, including AV1 decode support; Adaptive Sync; Display HDR support; and artificial intelligence capabilities thanks to DP4a deep-learning inference acceleration.

These Intel Iris Xe PCI cards have 80 EUs and 4GB of dedicated on-board LPDDR4X video memory. Moreover, as discrete add-in-cards, they could draw more power and feature much heftier cooling solutions than the mobile integrated versions. You can see the Asus design is a passive card with large finned heatsink covering the length of the card (top), but Colorful has strapped on a serious overkill twin fan solution (below).

It is notable that the mobile integrated Intel Iris Xe Max graphics also adds a dedicated 4GB of LPDDR4X but features more EUs (96). Tests show that the Intel Iris Xe Max graphics in a laptop trades blows with AMD's Ryzen 4000 integrated RX Vega 8 GPU and Nvidia's discrete GeForce MX3550 in gaming overall, but results vary greatly by game.

Due to the OEM/SI nature of this release we don't have specific availability dates for these graphics cards but expect them to show up in the “high-volume, value-desktop market," shortly.