Intel has started sampling DG2 video cards for gaming

Intel has started sampling its upcoming DG2 graphics cards. Those GPUs are based on Intel’s Xe-HPG microarchitecture and are intended for gaming. The company also said that its Ponte Vecchio data center GPU is currently being validated.

Although Intel has not yet announced a concrete release date for its DG2 video cards, it has already started handing out samples to partners. The company announced this during the ISC High Performance 2021 event. That suggests that the release of these DG2 chips is close.

An Intel employee previously reported that the DG2 GPUs are “on the doorstep” and the company confirmed last year that it will release its upcoming gaming graphics cards in 2021. The Xe-HPG GPUs get hardware support for ray tracing, among other things. According to previous rumors, Intel will come with at least five different DG2 variants. The GPUs should be available as separate video cards for desktops and laptops.

Intel’s upcoming Xe-HPC GPU for data centers, called Ponte Vecchio, has now been turned on in its lab, according to the company. That GPU is currently in the validation process, which is ‘progressing well’. Ponte Vecchio is intended for exascale computing and consists of 47 different tiles on a single package, which consists of ‘more than 100 billion transistors’. The Ponte Vecchio chips will be available from OEMs, but Intel will also come with a subsystem with four such GPUs. It is not yet known when the Xe-HPC chips will be released.