While Nvidia and AMD are preparing for a fall battle with the GeForce RTX 3080 and Big Navi, Intel could bring a new graphics challenge in 2021.

Intel has already stated that its first discrete GPU in decades will offer serious gaming performance and ray tracing capabilities, aiming to challenge AMD and Nvidia's GPUs. But according to ITHome, Intel's Xe-HPG graphics card will feature a GPU manufactured on a 6-nanometer process node. [Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) will manufacture the chipset for Intel and will use state-of-the-art lithography technology to do so; by manufacturing the 6nm GPU, Intel is using it in Apple's A13 Bionic chip, which is used in the iPhone 11 They are expecting an 18% improvement in logic density compared to TSMC's 7nm process. [The Nvidia Ampere GPU architecture uses TSMC's 7nm process node, while the Turing architecture used in current GeForce graphics cards uses the 12nm node.

Although not a fact for certain, it is usually expected that the lower the node number, the more transistors that can be packed into a chip. Therefore, the 6nm node allows for a powerful GPU at the heart of an Intel Xe-HPG graphics card. [However, specs alone are not enough, as maximizing the performance of graphics accelerators requires hardware and software optimization. This is an area where both AMD and Nvidia have a lot of experience with gaming.

However, Intel excels at getting the most out of its processing units, and its CPUs often offer more performance than one would expect from the number of cores. Therefore, Intel can bring this expertise to the dedicated graphics market, along with its knowledge of other GPUs that it has developed by producing integrated GPUs for processors.

It is still early days for Xe-HPG graphics, so it will be a while before we know if Intel can be the pigeon among pigeons in the graphics world. However, innovation in this area means more competition and better products at more attractive prices for PC gamers and builders.