Intel’s Raja Koduri has shared some new details about the pricing of the new Xe discrete graphics cards that the blue team is currently working on. According to Koduri, Intel wants to build Xe GPUs for everyone, with their starting price at $200.

As Koduri said in an interview with the Russian YouTube Channel Pro Hi-Tech, Intel aims to target price over performance. My guess is that the blue team will do its best to build a user base as fast as possible. To that end, an inexpensive GPU may play a major role.

Koduri has also confirmed that there will be larger graphics cards with access to HBM memory. This basically hints at Intel targeting both the low-end and mid-end GPU markets. As for the high-end market, I’m not sure whether Intel’s first discrete GPU will be able to compete with the big boys.

Moreover, Koduri acknowledged how important real-time ray tracing is for video-games. As Koduri noted, real-time ray tracing is a new powerful tool for video-game developers. However, he still believes that high framerates are more important thanks to rasterization still being used in most games. Koduri believes that right now, ray tracing is simply the cherry on the top. As such, and while hardware-accelerated ray tracing can potentially improve visuals, he believes that not everyone is willing to pay for running ray traced scenes with high framerates.

Koduri concluded that he is a big fan of ray tracing games that can run at 60fps. However, and from a business-perspective, he does not believe that most gamers care to spend a lot of money for this tech. According to him, ray tracing won’t be another gimmick and will be successful in the future. However, this will happen only when mid-tier GPUs will be able to run ray traced games.

You can find the entire video interview below, though – and since it’s in Russian – there aren’t proper subs for it yet. Still, it’s really fascinating listening to Raja’s opinion about real-time ray tracing and the whole GPU market.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:

Pro Hi-Tech took down the video. Moreover, Intel provided Tomshardware with a correct translation of Koduri’s Xe GPU comments.

“Not everybody will buy a $500-$600 card, but there are enough people buying those too – so that’s a great market.

So the strategy we’re taking is we’re not really worried about the performance range, the cost range and all because eventually our architecture as I’ve publicly said, has to hit from mainstream, which starts even around $100, all the way to Data Center-class graphics with HBM memories and all, which will be expensive.

We have to hit everything; it’s just a matter of where do you start? The First one? The Second one? The Third one? And the strategy that we have within a period of roughly – let’s call it 2-3 years – to have the full stack.”