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You're absolutely correct. Especially in the low-power segment, which AMD and nvidia have really ignored lately.

If you want a <=75 watt GPU, which happens to be the limit for the PCIe slot without an external power connector, you have very limited options. For nVidia, the 1650 is the only modern part that will fit the bill. For AMD, you have to reach back to the RX 500 series, but good luck finding one. They're extremely uncommon even among the lower-end 500 series, as many of them require an external connector anyways.

AMD do have lower-powered "workstation" offerings, but they're so expensive that it's hard to imagine putting one in a workstation voluntarily. They're also extremely poor performers, to the extent that you might not really see much of a benefit over a Vega iGPU.

The Xe Max is only 25W TDP, which is very attractive if you're hoping to build a passively cooled Linux machine with a low-wattage power supply.

> AMD do have lower-powered "workstation" offerings, but they're so expensive that it's hard to imagine putting one in a workstation voluntarily.

But goodness are they pretty.

I recently started using GT710 for driving 3x of my 2K monitors at 85hz via HDMI. It works quite well even with Nouveau on Linux. That's not exactly modern, but it has 4 HDMI and cost around $50 too. Also fits into PCIe x1 slot and using under 25W.

Agreed. It's really surprisingly hard to find a quiet card that can do 2x 4K displays @60Hz.

The old ones don't support HDMI 2.0 so can only do 30Hz.

I've got a Gigabyte 1660 GTX in my desktop connected to one 4K display at 60Hz and that's doesn't even spin the fans up on the desktop. Even flat out it's barely audible. I don't know about two monitors but I suspect the story will be similar.

The Vega 11 cores in the Ryzen 3400G are pretty good. I'm using a Ryzen with Vega 8 in my laptop (Lenovo T495s) with Fedora which is about as nice as it gets TBH. I'm happy and I'm a difficult and hypercritical individual when it comes to being happy.

Yeah I feel like AMD are pushing the G series CPU's at the "low end decent" gpu market. They sip power and still are pretty rad.

Yeah got to be honest that I built a 3400G based system for my daughter so she could play Sims, GTA V and Apex Legends and it's not that much worse than my 1660GTX and 3700X to use. I'm starting to think I didn't need to pay as much for the extra juice.

But why would any of those people want this part? The only way I see it is if you want an Intel GPU for the compatibility in an otherwise AMD system. If not the Intel CPU you'd build already includes a more than capable GPU this generation.

maybe I'm missing something important, but it seems like it could only be a super niche part for a laptop. why spend extra board area and BOM on an eGPU that barely outperforms the iGPU?

seems like it would make more sense as an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel desktop part. maybe you have some old desktop that you want to turn into an HTPC, but it doesn't have the right ports or the ability to decode high bitrate video in realtime. plop one of these guys in for (ideally) $xx and you're good to go. of course, this would be the opposite of the high-margin stuff intel likes to make.

The GPU is usually an important part to upgrade to get old desktop hardware on with the times. Not because of games, but because having modern or many Displayport/HDMI connections is nice, and modern hardware video codecs can offload a lot of heavy duty number crunching work from your CPU [1].

Any Sandy Bridge to 1st gen Skylake desktop does not have these connections or codecs and could often really benefit from a decent $50-$80 add on GPU. Desktop Sandy Bridge can still make for a very decent computer if you can keep upgrade costs in check. An Intel Xe would also be a decent upgrade if you now already depend on some crappy older Nvidia or AMD GPU.

[1]: Besides your basic h264/hevc/vp9 decoding, it seems Intel Xe has AV1 hardware video decoding, which you can otherwise only get in the very expensive/hard to get/power hungry AMD and Nvidia discrete GPUs (to be) released this month.

This would be a nice upgrade for an older server. Older Dell and HP servers can host piles of storage and ram; they can make great workstation bargains, but you need to add a GPU. The Intel Xe could be a way to do that without much power draw.

But the existing HP or sell server has huge power draw, so why try to save a few watts on a low power GPU.

This part is laptop only.

Sure, I should spell out that I'm commenting on the obvious and much leaked next step which is PCIe cards based on this line of chips.

Makes sense. Most consumer video cards is for gaming, but latest video cards also help for other works. dGPU with latest QSV would be blessing for NVR server.

More recently Intel's GPUs have started to require proprietary firmware, which they did not need before, although probably it was embedded in the GPU before.

Every vendor requires proprietary firmware now, afaik.

> But AMD and Nvidia are treating the low end GPU market as some sort of a backwater

Are they though? The GPU embedded in my ryzen 4900 seems to be just as good, if not better than this xe. The desktop version I would expect to show even better.

The iGPUs are great, but low-end discrete GPUs are largely ignored.

The use case is for people who want HEDT CPUs but don't need high-end GPU power. Getting a modern low-power GPU allows you to still support modern codecs, modern display adapters, and high resolution displays.

So you're willing to pay $1000 for a HEDT CPU but not $150 for a modern GPU?

The price range for HEDT really starts at about $500. That includes low-end Core-X, 2nd gen Threadripper, and Ryzen 9 CPUs (which is essentially HEDT for many use cases).

As it stands, there is no GPU that:

- consumes 75W or less of power (i.e. running only on PCIe power)

- has a modern architecture (with the latest codecs, display adapters, good perf-per-watt, etc.)

- has solid support from open source drivers.

Understandably, it's a niche use case. But AMD hasn't launched a new GPU in that range for almost 4 years.

But this isn't a discrete GPU for desktops... this announcement literally says it's for thin and light laptop applications.

The desktop application is going to be OEM only and there's no indication at this point that it'll even be used to power external monitors vs. just a GPU offload for AI/ML workloads.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16211/intels-dg1-gpu-coming-t...

> But this isn't a discrete GPU for desktops... this announcement literally says it's for thin and light laptop applications.

Yes, I know. This particular thread of conversation was started by my comment about my excitement for what this means when the desktop counterpart is released.

AMD is barely selling the desktop 4000 series (zen2) apus. OEM sales only, in limited countries. I obtained two through aliexpress, but that's not for the faint of heart.

With US retailers, you're limited to zen+, 4-core chips when zen3 cpus (with no gpu) are arriving shortly. Just because I don't want a high power GPU doesn't mean I want a CPU that old and limited.

AMD sells these older designs on generation behind nodes (eg: 14nm) as they need to be on time and under budget to get OEM design wins.

If they miss the timeline to get laptop chips out the door for back to school season, Dell, HP, Asus, etc will just go with Intel as the vat majority of laptop sales happen in one short period of the year.

TSMC 7nm production is at capacity, Apple has the bulk of the wafers and AMD has to share the remainder with other customers on that 7nm process. Nvidia literally got no wafers allocated by TSMC, hence why they have been forced to use Samsung's half baked 8nm process that performs much worse.

Intel also has an history of bad OpenGL implementations, where their drivers would state to implement features, which were actually done in software, making meaningless the feature query to decide what to call.

Is there any vendor who doesn't do that? I remember conversations with Nvidia driver peeps on the OpenGL boards 20+ years ago, and it was very very striking that they would always, always, flatly refuse to implement any kind of "is it in hardware?" query. Waste of time even asking.

It wasn't spelled out, but I think the implied rationale was that doing so would just be used against them by competitors' marketing in a bullet-point feature comparison. And maybe a bit of "you don't care if it's hardware, you care if it's fast", which isn't unreasonable.

Sure but Intel was the worst among everyone else.

There are some obscure features in OpenGL like line stipple or selection mode. Most of them have been deprecated for over a decade, but there is still some CAD applications that rely on these functionalities and ancient OpenGL 1.3 semantics. It makes no sense to use silicon space to implement such features, if you can emulate them in software. Also, doing things in software doesn't always imply slow, because many old OpenGL features can be reimplemented with modern OpenGL using shaders, so it's done by hardware, just there is no dedicated HW support for it.

Back in the day they were doing this, shaders weren't still a thing, so you would get a slow CPU emulation instead.

> Yeah! People say AMD has the best Linux drivers, but they're wrong! Intel's are feature rich and stable, and I think they're better than AMD's [1].

I'd like to counter this. Intel's driver quality is going down for a year or so. My old EliteBook 850G2 is running with Intel Graphics but, it started to show some flickering and corruptions for no reason. Nobody bothered to fix it yet.

Intel's e1000e drivers started to behave awry on some older cards and, Intel didn't fix it. On the contrary, they continued to pile patches over this buggy driver. Kernel guys and Debian developers had to revert some patches back to stabilize the driver again. It still loses connectivity sometimes.

By older cards, I mean some of them are barely two years old.

IF, a big IF, Intel gets its thing together and restores the quality, it's great. Otherwise, I don't put them on a pedestal for driver quality.

On the Windows side, I have an Intel wireless card which is officially supported by current drivers but, the new drivers bork the card after standby and system has to be powered off to restore card connectivity. The computer is a HP Spectre X2 convertible and, only older, out of the box Windows drivers (which are stock Intel drivers) can utilize the card correctly.

>They're just kind of ignored since nobody "chooses" to use an Intel GPU in their computer.

That is not entirely accurate though.

From a total GPU market presumptive, Low End / Low Power equals integrated GPU. And both AMD and Nvidia simply cant compete with that. The market of a Low End GPU is tiny and unprofitable. When most consumers or customers are happy with their Intel iGPU.

I dont blame them for lack of SKUs in this segment. And AMD is competing with their own APU as well.

Exactly. The market for GPUs using 75W should get interesting soon.

> But AMD and Nvidia are treating the low end GPU market as some sort of a backwater

I have to guess that's because the low end GPU market is not very profitable.

Yeah AMD drivers on linux are not very good. I fell for the nvidia hate because of its propritory drivers so upgraded with an AMD Ryzen Apu instead of just getting a new nvidia graphics card. It's not even a recent APU it's almost 1+ years old. Now I am still using the my nvidia card as the Ryzen Apu can't output 4k and need to upgrade my graphics card anyway.

What apu? I have a laptop with a Ryzen 5 3500U that can drive a 4K monitor just fine.

Ryzen 5 3400g. I have the same Apu in my work pc that runs windows 10 so I know it's powerful enough to output to 4k but I don't even get the option to change to 4k in display manager. Tried the latest 5.9 kernel, Amd proprietary drivers many other things now I have given up just waiting for the new generation of nvidia cards to start arriving in quantity so I can get an older generation card cheaply

I don't know what's going on. The 3500U and 3400G should be essentially the same silicon. I'm running Solus, which should have the latest kernel. Maybe try a different distro using a USB live distro just to see?

I got a top of the line AMD card for compute > 1 year ago. Still does not have ROCm support, so its been sitting in a shelf for >1 year.

Some people here value "open source" drivers over "working drivers". I value "working drivers" over "open source" drivers over "proprietary" drivers.

An open source driver that does not work, is worth zero to me.

If it were true that "open source" means somebody can go and fix the driver, then somebody could have added ROCm support for the 5700 XT a long time ago. The fact that this has not happen, to me at least, means that open source is not as valuable as people seem to try to make it be here.

Sure it is better than closed source, but if your driver doesn't work, and AMD doesn't want to fix it, it definitely does not mean that anybody will fix it within the lifetime of the card. This card will be surpassed by the 6000 series next week, no chance I'm going to buy one of those.

Navi cards are not compute cards. They are gamer cards.

For compute, you need Polaris op Vega, the documentation is very clear about chips supported.

> They're just kind of ignored since nobody "chooses" to use an Intel GPU in their computer. You just get one bundled in your CPU, until now that is.

People looking for Linux laptops certainly do. I've tried the AMD route twice the last ten years and I've been disappointed by crappy driver support and battery life in both cases.

> nobody "chooses" to use an Intel GPU in their computer.

I did. My laptop has i3-6157u CPU, I chose it due to the Intel Iris GPU there.

If I would be looking for a new one today, for similar reasons I would have picked an AMD APU.

But for your scenario, an integrated GPU is just fine, and Intel already cover that market well.

To justify it existence, a discrete GPU need to be better than that.

Ryzen normally doesn't have an iGPU though, and the APUs (which do) typically come out much later and don't scale as well as their CPU counterparts.