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In 2020, the first discrete GPU called Arctic Sound from Intel is expected to enter the market. The first information will be available in December.

Intel develops its own discrete graphics cards

The graphics card market is almost boring at the moment, we might say. The only two manufacturers are AMD and Nvidia. While AMD currently has little to offer in the high-end sector, Nvidia is in the opinion of many players in the wrong direction. So the company offers raytracing with the Turing generation for the first time, but throws back the players in the first available games to Full HD and 60 FPS. However, the increase in performance without raytracing is modest. So the RTX 2080 is only on the level of the GTX 1080 Ti, but costs the same. The same applies to the RTX 2070 and the GTX 1080. The problem is that AMD simply can’t (yet) be expected to compete in this area.

However, a new player will enter the field in 2020. As Intel already announced in June, they are working on their own discrete graphics cards. This was already apparent in advance, as the company poached AMD’s graphics boss, Raja Koduri, and other AMD employees. The graphic cards codenamed Arctic Sound will also be used in the data center for streaming, deep learning and AI, but a variant for players is also planned. It is not yet known in which performance dimension Intel will deliver here, but the company probably wants to enter the high-end market. The support of Adaptive Sync, which is already in use as Freesync for AMD graphics cards, shows that players are also the target. In addition, there should be Day 1 patches for important games. In December Intel might already publish first details about Arctic Sound.

First details about Arctic Sound in December

As the industry service DigiTimes reports, an event by Intel will take place in December this year, where everything will revolve around Arctic Sound. At the event, graphics boss Raja Koduri will talk with other developers and managers about the first details of the Intel graphics card. It’s rather uncommon for Intel to publish details about Arctic Sound so early on. DigiTimes doesn’t mention a concrete source either. It remains to be seen whether an event will actually take place in December. However, another player is definitely good for the graphics market.