Intel’s Ruixuan GPU: A Powerful and Cost-Effective Choice for Gamers and Video Creators Alike

In June last year, when Intel released the first desktop-level discrete graphics card, the Sharp A380, most consumers took a wait-and-see attitude.

In the past year, Intel has updated 21 driver updates for discrete graphics cards, and each update has achieved performance improvements. It demonstrates Intel’s determination to make independent graphics cards with actions, and also increases consumers’ interest.

“We will definitely insist on ‘one way to the bright’ on the path of graphics cards and GPUs.” Gao Yu, general manager of Intel’s technology department in China, emphasized again at a recent technology sharing meeting.

But what can really impress users directly is that Intel has provided driver optimization support for 42 newly released games in the past period of time on the first day. In addition, Intel has also made full adaptations for DaVinci and clipping, which are commonly used by video creators.

Gamers who pursue higher cost performance, as well as content creators who pursue higher efficiency, will obviously look forward to the different choices brought by Ruixuan.

Six characteristics of Ruixuan GPU hardware

A powerful GPU must be a fusion of excellent hardware and software. For Intel, it is not difficult to design a discrete GPU with excellent hardware architecture.

Released last year based on Intel X^e When the desktop discrete graphics card Ruixuan A series with HPG micro-architecture,The six major hardware advancements are impressive, including:

One is that Ruixuan almost perfectly supports all functions of DirectX 12 Ultimate;

The second is that the first generation of products has realized ray tracing. The physical acceleration unit of ray tracing in Ruixuan graphics card, each X^e There are Ray Tracking Unit (RTU) and Thread Sorting Unit (TSU) in Core, which are special hardware accelerators designed to improve the efficiency of ray tracing;

The third is that the XMX AI matrix accelerator is included in the architecture, and the performance of AI can be improved by orders of magnitude;

Fourth, with the help of high-performance AI accelerators, the X^eSS AI super-sampling technology allows all games to achieve leapfrog improvement from image quality to performance;

Fifth, inheriting the “powerful lineage” of Intel’s media functions, Ruixuan GPU contains two dedicated media codecs, which can support almost all media formats on the Internet;

Sixth, Intel GPU is the first to support hard decoding and hard coding of AV1 codec. Thanks to the free, high-compression, and high-quality features of AV1, video sites will quickly migrate from traditional codec formats to AV1 in the future, and Intel is the first to support it.

Gamers look forward to more cost-effective discrete graphics cards

To perceive the advanced nature of hardware, GPU users also need software.

That is to say, before the GPU is polished, the focus is on the hardware, and after the release, the focus is on the software.

“Optimization at the software level includes both the improvement of the comprehensive software performance of the graphics card and the continuous expansion of the ecology.” Gao Yu pointed out.

From the perspective of improving game experience,There are two aspects that can be optimized, drivers and cooperation with developers.

Driver updates can improve game performance and also determine the effect of game support.

“We hear a lot of customer feedback, sayingIntel’s graphics card is very advanced, but the support for older games is slightly lacking.So we are committed to solving this problem. In the driver update of Ruixuan in February, the performance of DX9 games has increased by as much as 43%. “The example given by Gao Yu is enough to show that Intel attaches great importance to players.

In fact, after the release of the product, the Intel GPU software team refactored the DX9 driver based on the feedback obtained to achieve performance improvements.

The challenge of cooperating with developers and supporting the game ecosystem is even greater. Intel X with good grades^eSS technology as an example,At present, more than 50 games have integrated X^eSS options, many of which are international masterpieces.

X^eSS is a time-amortized super-sampling technology based on deep learning. It has two main purposes.One is to enlarge high-quality images, such as enlarging 1080P images to 4K, and the other is to achieve very high anti-aliasing.

Super-sampling technology is not a new technology in the GPU field. There are technical challenges, but it is even more difficult to cooperate with developers to fully exploit X^eSS advantage.

“As long as some games detect an Intel graphics card by default, it will be recognized as an integrated graphics card, and effects such as ray tracing are turned off by default.” An engineer from the Intel GPU software team said, “We must first let developers get our cards before we can go further. adaptation and optimization, to exhibit the Intel X^eSS’s advantages in performance and picture quality, and then persuaded them to integrate Intel’s technology. “

Game developers want to play X^eThe advantage of SS is that dynamic vector graphics and low-resolution RGB images are required. By using these two pieces of data, the XeSS model can output high-quality, high-resolution images.

X^eAs an AI-based technology, SS has a significant advantage that it can adjust parameters for optimization.

“We train X on very large datasets^eSS model, but inevitably there are some very rare scenarios lacking data. Now we cooperate with some game developers and add their data to our training set, and the newly trained model can solve the rare flickering situation very well. said an engineer at Intel.

The latest release X^eSS 1.1 version, compared to X^eSS 1.0 further improves image quality and temporal stability, and adds auto exposure function support for improved visual quality. Through targeted optimization, XeSS 1.1 improves the flickering and moiré patterns in the game, and users of Intel discrete graphics and integrated graphics can enjoy a better gaming experience.

at x^eIntel also provides comprehensive support for SS game integration.For Unreal Engine-based games, support X in a simple way through plugins^eSS, including Unreal Engine* 4.26+ and Unreal Engine* 5, just released Unreal Engine* 5.2 version, XeSS is also the first to provide support.

As for the self-developed game engine, Intel provides a wealth of documentation, sample code and engineers to help developers integrate X^eSS technology.

Intel’s many initiatives are to make it easier for developers to integrate X^eSS technology, of course, is to allow the final game player to have a better gaming experience.

with X^eSS technology, combined with the optimization of core performance, on the Ruixuan A770 and A750 graphics cards, the game quality can be set to the highest level, and the ray tracing effect can be turned on to achieve a very smooth effect, allowing you to play 3A masterpieces.

With the mainstream Ruixuan A380, it can work with X at 1080P resolution^eWith SS technology, most games can run at 60 frames or above, and have a very smooth gaming experience.

Obviously, for most players who buy 1,000 yuan graphics cards, they can get enough gaming experience at a high enough cost performance ratio, which is a good new choice for a large number of gamers.

Video Creators Expect Export Times to Speed ​​Up

The experience of GPU games lies in the smoothness and stability of the adapted games and picture quality. The key to using GPU as a productivity tool is efficiency.

In the circle of video creators, DaVinci (Da Vinci) and Jianying are very popular professional video editing software. The performance optimization of these two video editing software is enough to make many video creators look forward to it.

All Ruixuan GPU series products are equipped with a complete advanced X^eThe media engine includes two sets of video codecs and video post-processors. Through the optimization of the driver, the additional overhead of the hardware can be reduced and the potential of the hardware can be brought into play.

Da Vinci’s workload is relatively complex, including encoding and decoding, and also uses local general-purpose computing to process some more complex special effects.

The Intel Sharp software team has optimized the OpenCL driver for Vinci’s load. Comparing the 3959 driver released last year with the latest 4369 driver, Da Vinci using PugetBench has an overall performance improvement of 33% on the Sharp A750. Some of the fusion task subitems increased by 40%, and the 4K media task increased by 27%. The improvement on the Ruixuan A770 is even greater, and the overall improvement can reach 40%.

These performance improvements are mainly due to three major optimizations for the OpenCL driver:Centralized cache pool, optimized for main memory and video memory copy, delayed destruction of resources.

In addition to reducing driver overhead, the utilization of the GPU engine is improved through fine-grained synchronization.Ruixuan GPU can also give full play to the unique functions of GPU to accelerate tasks by adapting content creation software.

In a typical scenario, DaVinci can make full use of the video post-processor engine of the Intel Sharp graphics card, thereby bringing about a performance improvement of nearly 2 times and realizing the real-time preview of dual-channel 8K60FPS video material.

One of the difficulties of optimizing for clipping is that sometimes there will be a decoding engineencoding engine, 3D engine and other three or five engines work together, these engines work together like an assembly line, to optimize it is necessary to handle the dependencies between the engines.

“For the pure video export scene of clipping, we have implemented a more refined dependency management between GPU engines in the driver, and only wait for dependencies between decoding and 3D special effects. This can avoid many engine dependencies. The video export performance can be improved by 10%, and the corresponding user export time can also be reduced by 10%.” Intel GPU software engineer said.

The optimization for clipping special effects export is the key point and also the difficulty point.Different from other video editing software, Jianying was originally a software for mobile terminals, and then there was a professional version of Jianying for PC. Therefore, Jianying uses the popular cross-platform technology OpenGL ES for mobile terminals.

However, there is no native OpenGL ES driver on the PC side. “For this special software stack, we worked closely with Jianying to apply the memory compression technology in the Ruixuan graphics card to the software stack, which solved the problem of video memory bandwidth pressure. Now It has nearly doubled the performance of the clipping special effect shader (Shader), and has fully adapted the clipping OpenGL ES on D3D11 software stack to Intel’s sharp graphics card.” Intel GPU software engineer introduced.

In addition to professional video editing software,In the face of the current hot generative AI, Intel is also doing a lot of work for creators.

Based on Intel OpenVINO, the AI ​​drawing open source model Stable Diffusion can use the open source image editing software GIMP to run smoothly on Intel Sharp A750, A770 and other graphics cards, and simple text input can intelligently realize creative drawing.

For Intel, there is still a long way to go for independent graphics cards, and it needs to continue to work closely with game engine providers, game studios, content creation developers, AIC manufacturers, etc. to create more competitive GPU products.

Now, gamers and content creators can purchase Intel reference graphics cards as well as graphics cards from partners such as Acer, ASRock, and Blue Halberd.

Obviously, Intel’s discrete graphics card provides a more cost-effective option for a large number of players, and an additional cost-effective option is always something to be thankful and expect for gamers and content creators.Leifeng.com(Public number: Leifeng.com)

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