DF Direct Special: Inside Intel Arc – What's Happening With GPUs, XeSS and Ray Tracing?

It’s been a rocky road to market for Intel with its Arc range of graphics cards… and just over a year since Intel talked to us about its plans. In this extended interview, Alex and Rich talk to Intel Fellow Tom Petersen about the state of play with Intel Arc, what’s going on with DX11, DX12, Vulcan and Resizeable BAR, plus there’s new information on XeSS upscaling (which we’re currently testing) and what Intel says is best-in-class ray tracing performance. Also: just where will machine learning take us in the graphics space?

Join the DF Patreon for pristine video downloads, behind the scenes content, early access to DF Retro, early access to DF Direct Weekly and much, much more: https://bit.ly/3jEGjvx

Subscribe for more Digital Foundry: http://bit.ly/DFSubscribe

Want some DF-branded tee-shirts, mugs, hoodies or pullovers? Check out our store: https://bit.ly/2BqRTt0

00:00 – Intro
00:35 – How has Intel’s projections for Arc’s release date evolved?
02:06 – How did Intel decide on the release strategy for Intel Arc?
05:07 – Intel Arc GPU stack
06:56 – Intel Arc performance landscape
08:28 – What is the difference between games that makes them run better or worse by default on Intel Arc without driver optimizations?
11:14 – How did Resizable Bar become essential to the performance of Intel Arc?
13:19 – Why focus on Ray Tracing in the 1st generation of Intel Arc?
15:58 – What is it about Arc that makes it performant in Ray Tracing?
18:48 – What does XeSS bring to the market vs the competition (DLSS, FSR 2.0)?
20:53 – DP4a Performance
22:21 – What is the endgame for XeSS’s place among upscalers?
25:07 – How is XeSS versioned and integrated into games?
27:09 – Does XeSS handle user-configurable image sharpness?
28:10 – Is the footprint of XeSS low-enough to still be performant on DP4a?
29:25 – How does the machine learning model contribute to XeSS?
36:12 – Are there other areas that AI could expand to in the GPU?
38:00 – Could AI interpolate temporally (synthesize new frames)?
40:29 – How does XeSS handle object disocclusion?
42:03 – Does Intel plan to target to upper echelon of performance with Intel Arc?
44:28 – Intel in the long-term as the 3rd major competitor in the GPU space
45:03 – What are some things you’d love to see in the Intel drivers in the next 5 years (no promises)?
47:48 – How does Intel Smooth Sync work?
50:34 – What is Intel doing in the space of GPU accelerated compression/decompression?
52:08 – Could Intel Arc support writing data from disk directly into VRAM?
53:16 – Conclusion

Thanks Hikaru Yoroi for the timestamps!