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Comment by intricatedetail | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually comparable to new Nvidia or AMD offerings? I have a feeling that Intel wastes environment by polluting the earth with sub par products lately. They need to release something remarkably better than the competition or it is likely game over.

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Yes, Xe for laptops is comparable with AMD's Ryzen 4xxx for laptops and Nvidia's MX350 for laptops (in particular, replacing a discrete MX350 with a Xe IGP reduces the number of chips needed). The MX450 tends to be faster but you can't win them all.

The high-performance gaming variant (Xe-HPG) has not been released so we don't know if it's any good.

It's different. Xe LP, which exists right now in integrated and discrete forms, is comparable to low-end discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD and AMD's APUs. The most distinctive feature of the Xe LP variant is the emphasis on video encoding hardware.

The real question, though, is what sort of performance Xe HP/HPG/HPC will bring when they're released. They don't need to significantly outperform the competition (AMD has more than demonstrated in the past that superior GPU performance alone is not enough), they just need to be close enough with a good enough software story. Cuda and Nvidia's driver stack are both reasonably nice and a pain in the ass to work with, so if Intel can (1) competently support major ML frameworks, (2) reasonably support porting from Cuda, and (3) maintain a competent OpenCL implementation that could be enough to be competitive. They'll likely eat market share from AMD first, since the AMD software stack has more rough edges.

I really would be interested in a discrete PCIe GPU for a low power desktop. Not everyone wants to upgrade to a new mobo entirely.

I will take any discrete GPU that works stably on Linux and is 75W peak draw or under. I hear good things about the newer AMD lineup with the open-source AMD drivers, but even the most low-end of those all take an external power-connector, which puts them over 75W of peak draw.

DG1 sounds ideal for this but you can't buy it.

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

Hopefully there's some way to get it when it's released

According to videocardbenchmark.net Intel Xe graphics are about 20% faster than the GT1030, that currently leads in the world of single slot low power GPUs

I have a 1050Ti and there is no combination of graphics drivers and KDE compositor settings that will let me browse the web stably with firefox and webrender.

I don't care if it's 20% slower than the GT1030 if I can browse the web in firefox under KDE with default settings! Since I replace my graphics card less often than I replace my CPU, I would pay a premium for such a device.

What about the ryzen CPUs with integrated graphics? I've been using an old A8 APU and it's decent.

Edit: just saw you said discrete. Oops.

I want it for that same reason, but with another bit which isn't known yet (I think). If the discrete card supports gvt-g then it'll be the cheapest and easiest way to share full hardware acceleration of a gpu in a vm with a single card. This then also still lets the host use the gpu at the same time. All the offerings from amd and nvidia cost a lot and nvidias even require special licensing.

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