What They Say
Intel announced its new Arc discrete GPU and Technology analyst and sometime Display Daily contributors, Bob O’Donnell and Dr Jon Peddie also reported on the GPU which is the first in a number of generations that are planned. Among features that could impact displays are:
- The chip is said to be the first to support hardware encoding and decoding of the AV1 codec. The encode feature is said to be 50X faster than software implementations and Intel claims to have a way to ‘gang up’ the video processors to bring them to bear on an encoding process.
- The Xe Media Engine is said to be optimised for 8K workloads with AV1 up to 8K with 10 bit HDR. It also supports AVC, HEVC and VP9
- Intel sees AV1 as being able to support game streaming. It has less distortion than H.264 at the same bit rate.
- It has a feature called Smooth Sync used when there the display frame rates do not match the frame rate of the GPU to minimise the ‘tearing’ effect. Jon Peddie said that the system blurs the edges of the new overlapping frame using a dithering filter.
- It has new supersampling that supports AI-enhanced upscaling. There’s a video here and Intel said that the new GPU is 2.35X faster at upscaling than its previous Iris Xe integrated graphics processor (using Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI)
- The Arc Xe display engine can support four UltraHD 120Hz displays over HDMI 2.0b or DisplayPort 1.4a or dual 8K 60Hz displays. 1080P and 1440P displays can be driven up to 360Hz. Alternatively, when ready, it will support DisplayPort 2.0
The first PC to have the GPU as an option is the Galaxy Book2Pro (which uses a 13.3″ or 15.6” FullHD OLED) but other PC brands will follow.
What We Think
The GPU will feature first in notebooks, then in desktops and workstations. (BR)
Intel’s XE GPU table – Notebooks now followed by desktops then workstations
