The first pre-built gaming PC with Intel's Xe dedicated graphics installed has appeared in the CyberPowerPC catalog, giving gamers the first change to put money down on intel's new generation of discrete graphics — that is if you don't want to wait for reviews. Which you should.
Intel announced several years ago that its graphics division was going to build more than just integrated graphics in the future. Intel hired a bunch of respective industry veterans, including Raja Koduri from AMD, and began work on a full size graphics card for the first time in over a decade. The first results of those efforts played out on mobile, where Intel remains a strong hold on the market, with its first-generation Xe graphics on Tiger Lake processors delivering impressive entry-level gaming performance.
We're now seeing the first of Intel's Xe graphics make their way to desktop PCs with an entry-level graphics card. This model features just 80 execution units, around the same as a mid-range laptop, but with 4GB of its own LPDDR4X memory. It's paired up with a Rocket Lake Core i5-11400F CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD.
It's clearly a budget gaming machine, and would likely be not that much better than a discrete AMD APU and certainly isn't going to be up to the standards of most AMD or Nvidia graphics cards of recent years. But then, can you get a graphics card like that at a decent price at the moment? While there are better gaming PCs out there, this early CyberPowerPC Xe GPU system could be pretty viable as a stop-gap PC.
Still, we'll need to see a lot more from Intel's Xe graphics efforts if we're going to be truly impressed.