Along with the launch of Intel’s Panther Lake laptop processor series yesterday, they also announced the presence of their latest graphics chip, the Intel Xe3, which the public, including us, expected to be part of their third-generation graphics processor series, “Celestial”.
However, Intel has confirmed that the Intel Xe3 still uses the same cores from the Intel Xe2 “Battlemage” graphics processor series, but with a number of improvements that give it up to 50% higher performance than the previous chip.
The Intel Xe3 processor chip will come in two core configurations, including 12 cores for high-performance processor models, and 4 cores for more affordable processor models.
Each core also maintains the configuration of eight Xe Vector cores for integer and floating-point arithmetic calculations, eight XMX engines for artificial intelligence processing purposes and one Ray-tracing core for gaming.
Intel says that the Intel Xe3 graphics chip is now more efficient in terms of core resource usage and helps in using these cores on a larger scale in the future, especially for use in desktop chips or data centers because of its ability to process AI tasks.
Intel has also confirmed that the Xe3 graphics chip will only be used in their laptop chip series for now, similar to the decision made to only use it in Intel Lunar Lake processors before.
All Intel Arrow Lake chips, including Arrow Lake-S for desktops and Arrow Lake-H for laptops use the first-generation Intel Xe processor. So far, Intel has not said anything about the Arrow Lake Refresh or Nova Lake desktop-class processor chips.
But perhaps what many users want to know is whether this new graphics processing chip will offer better performance for gaming compared to the previous model.
For now, Intel says yes, Xe3 will come with better performance, but maybe not in the way you would expect. They highlight the power efficiency of the Xe3 graphics chip by saying that for the same level of performance, the Xe3 is 40 percent more efficient in battery power consumption compared to the Xe2 graphics chip.
The expectation is that the Intel Xe3 chip will come with better graphics processing performance than the previous model, but power efficiency is still a priority for Intel.
Another big announcement made by Intel along with the Intel Xe3 processing chip is related to the Multi-Frame Generation technology that has already begun to be used by AMD and NVIDIA in their latest graphics cards.
Intel will also introduce their own version called Intel XeSS-MFG, which is an upgrade to the Intel Xe Frame Gen introduced through the Intel XeSS 2 earlier this year. Like other multi-frame generation technologies, it helps to increase the number of frames in games and allows them to be driven at a higher and more stable frame rate.
For more information on Intel's Xe3 technology, we expect we'll have to wait until early next year when Intel launches the full line of their Panther Lake processor chips, which they may also introduce Intel Core Ultra X models.