Intel’s first graphics card DG1 is being tested

It is in 2020 that Intel returns to the graphics card market, which means that two players will be three. During CES 2020, Intel showed a bunch of renderings of the very first graphics card and on site, the media also got to see the graphics card in physical form. The model called DG1 is now looking for a first performance test.

The first results appear in the Geekbench 5 database and affect OpenCL performance. The graphics card from Intel is identified as Gen12 and tested together with the processor Core i9-9900K accompanied by 16 GB DDR4 and the motherboard Z390 I Aorus Pro Wifi from Gigabyte.

The identification line together with the 96 calculation units listed indicates that this is Intel’s first graphics card, DG1. The graphics card is currently only for developers and has recently started to be sent out, with the aim that developers will learn about and optimize for the architecture before a future consumer launch.

The graphics card gets 12,053 in total points in the OpenCL test, which is a number of thousand points below what the Ryzen 5 3400G with integrated Vega 11 graphics gets. Worth noting is that it is a graphics card with Intel’s completely new architecture Xe, which means that there is probably room for real optimizations in both Intel’s own drivers and the performance test Geekbench.

In addition to points and performance figures, no previously known details about the graphics card appear. The 96 computing units have a maximum clock frequency of relatively low 1.05 GHz (1,050 MHz) and are equipped with 3 GB of graphics memory, which suggests that it has a memory bus of 96 or 192 bits in width.

The Intel DG1 is described as a test vehicle for developers and there are no guarantees that it will ever be released to consumers, at least not on the desktop side. Instead, it is rumored that Intel’s first graphics card on store shelves is DG2, which is said to have 384 computing units.

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