What just happened? Intel has announced that its Iris Xe discreet graphics cards for desktops are shipping to system builders for utilise. The company has adult the cards alongside board partners Asus and Colorful, and they will appear in pre-built systems aimed at mainstream users and small- to medium-sized businesses.

Formerly codenamed DG1, the Iris Xe desktop cards aren't aimed at demanding gamers—Intel isn't positioning them every bit a gaming products. They come with 4GB of LPDDR4X and feature 80 execution units, fewer than the 96 EUs found in the Iris Xe Max GPU used in Tiger Lake laptop CPUs. Intel compares the latter to Nvidia's MX350 to requite you an thought of its perceived competition.

The boards come up with three brandish outputs; hardware video decode and encode acceleration, including AV1 decode support; adaptive sync, and display HDR back up. They also have some artificial intelligence capabilities thanks to DP4a deep-learning inference acceleration.

While you lot're non going to be playing Microsoft Flying Simulator using i of these cards, they pave the manner for the inflow of the Xe DG2 GPU that reportedly use TSMC's enhanced 7nm process and come up with 512 EUs, potentially putting it head-to-head with the latest high-end offerings from Nvidia and AMD.

No word on when OEM systems packing these Iris Xe cards volition make it. They'll likely be here inside the next few months, offering an appealing budget alternative to the other systems with entry-level cards.

Meanwhile, the Xe DG2 is set to launch later in the year and is rumored to exist priced between $400 and $600.