Best Buy is selling a PC with a discrete Intel graphics card inside
It's now technically a three horse race in the discrete GPU space, because if you head over to Best Buy, you'll find a desktop system by CyberPowerPC that is configured with an Intel graphics card. Move over, AMD and Nvidia.
The system is a CyberPowerPC Xtreme Gamer desktop with an Intel Core i5 11400F processor (Rocket Lake), 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. There is no mention of the power supply unit, but it need not be a high wattage model. That discrete GPU that sits inside? It's an Intel Iris Xe DG1.
The DG1 is not the GPU that will have AMD and Nvidia shaking in their boots (or leather jackets). Intel's first implementation of the DG1 was the software development vehicle (SDV) kit it subsequently made available to its independent software vendor (ISV) partners over a year ago. We took one for a test drive and were not particularly impressed—it struggled even at 720p at minimum quality settings.
To be fair, though, that was simply a test vehicle for developers to get their feet wet with the Xe architecture. At the time, Intel told PCWorld that the final hardware, software, and drivers for its discrete Xe graphics cards will all be very different than what early impressions of the DG1 SDV showcased.
