Intel steals Nvidia's thunder with sneak peek at its first discrete GPU in years
It's been nearly 20 years since Intel produced a real graphics card.
On Monday, Aug. 20, graphics giant Nvidia is expected to announce its next-generation graphics cards -- the GeForce RTX 2080, or perhaps the GTX 1180. It should be based on a new Turing architecture that's theoretically capable of bringing significant levels of real-time ray tracing (think insanely realistic reflections and lighting, here's a demo) in video games .
But Intel is trying to pre-empt that party with a reminder that it, too, has a powerful graphics card in the works.
Intel's first discrete graphics card in nearly 20 years, in fact -- unless you count Intel's canceled Larrabee graphics, which kinda actually wasn't canceled and sort of morphed into a many-core co-processor, one which wound up becoming part of the world's fastest supercomputer for a bit.
With no further ado, here's Intel's new teaser tweet:
We will set our graphics free. #SIGGRAPH2018 pic.twitter.com/vAoSe4WgZX
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 15, 2018
Do we have any idea what Intel's GPU will be capable of? Not really. It's not even clear it'll be priced or specced for gaming, though we do know that AMD's Radeon architect Raja Koduri joined Intel to help build the product. And if it's coming in 2020, it probably won't deter you in the slightest from picking up a new GPU from Nvidia or AMD in 2018.
But it's a cool thing to look forward to, yeah?