Intel proposes "SLI" with integrated graphics and graphics cards

With low-level interfaces such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, graphics card manufacturers have lost much of the control they previously had with drivers. At the same time as the new interfaces have opened up new possibilities, they have led AMD and Nvidia to more or less invest in interconnected graphics cards with the technologies Crossfire and SLI, respectively.

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With DirectX 12, it is instead up to game developers to ensure that there is support for multiple graphics cards. An advantage of this is that the interface is agnostic to which manufacturers the two graphics cards come from, but also that the graphics circuits do not have to have similar capacity and performance. With SLI and Crossfire, two or more nearly identical graphics cards are normally paired together.

A third player that will soon enter the graphics card game is Intel, which now proposes that game developers should start using the integrated graphics part in processors even when a dedicated graphics card is installed. Otherwise, it is normal for the integrated graphics part of processors to be deactivated.

With DirectX 12, Microsoft introduced the Explicit Multi-Adapter, which makes it possible to combine different graphics cards / circuits and how it is used is up to the developers. In addition to more traditional methods such as distributing the rendering of frames between different graphics cards or dividing the rendering of an image into several, it is possible to transfer certain individual parts of the rendering process.

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What Intel intends to use is the latter in the interplay between integrated graphics components and dedicated graphics cards. To get there, the company has developed a code that will make it easier for game developers to implement just this. Examples of tasks that an integrated can relieve graphics cards with mentioned shadows, AI, mesh and physics.

It remains to be seen when and if game titles that use both the processor’s integrated graphics part and dedicated graphics cards. In such cases, it is likely that it will happen through a pronounced collaboration with Intel when the first Xe graphics cards reach the market.