Intel’s Raja Koduri Teases Xe HPG Enthusiast Gaming Graphics Cards In Action Within 3DMark Mesh Shader Test

A concept image of Intel’s upcoming XE GPUs.

Intel’s Senior Vice President, Raja Koduri, has been dropping some major bombs on his Twitter feed for a while now. The most recent one being the Xe HPC chip shot which is an engineering marvel but it looks like Raja has switched gears and now dropped a teaser of Intel’s first gaming discrete graphics cards, the Xe HPG.

Intel Teases Xe HPG Enthusiast Gaming Graphics Cards, Running 3DMark’s Upcoming Mash Shader Feature

It’s been some time since we last heard about Intel’s Xe HPG (High-Performance Gaming) discrete GPUs or graphics cards. Intel’s main focus has been Xe-LP and they also dive in deeper within the tech that Xe HPC has to offer considering it’s their biggest chip design to date and the flagship Xe product. But the Xe HPG is where the gaming community is more focused at and we have got the first teaser of Intel’s discrete graphics cards based on the HPG GPUs running in action.

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Xe HPG mesh shading in action, with the UL 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature test that is coming out soon pic.twitter.com/fnYeWoM08c

— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) February 10, 2021

The teaser from Raja shows an undisclosed Intel Xe HPG GPU based discrete graphics card running the UL 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature test. This test is coming out soon and will be integrated within the 3DMark test suite. Mesh Shader is one of the major features introduced within DirectX 12 Ultimate API back in 2020. The feature is supported by NVIDIA’s Turing, Ampere, and AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architectures. Based on this tweet, Intel will also be adding Mesh Shaders support on its Xe-HPG class discrete GPUs.

The technology helps to dramatically improve performance and image quality when rendering a scene with a substantial number of very complex objects. Take for instance a very complex & triangle-heavy mesh and what Mesh Shaders would essentially do is segment it into smaller meshlets. Each meshlet ideally optimizes the vertex re-use within it. Using the new hardware stages and this segmentation scheme, devs can render more geometry in parallel while fetching less overall data. An in-depth look at Mesh Shaders can be read at NVIDIA’s and Microsoft’s Dev blogs.

The same Mesh Shaders also bring the full power of generalized GPU Compute to the geometry pipe-line, allowing developers to build more dynamic worlds than before without compromising over performance. It allows for advanced culling techniques, LOD (Level of Detail), and an infinitely more procedural topology generation in a scene.

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The Xe HPG GPUs based on the Gen 12 graphics architecture is a brand new design hence it is expected of them to feature brand new shading techniques such as these. Other than that, Intel discrete graphics cards will fully support ray tracing and a range of other capabilities. Speaking of specifications, the graphics cards are expected to feature 512 Execution Units which translate to 4096 cores, GDDR6 memory, and will be fabricated by an external foundry, most probably TSMC. We will keep you posted if we hear more about Intel’s Xe HPG graphics cards.