Frank Azor, co-founder and vice president of Alienware, is well up for the prospect of having a third player in the graphics card game when Intel join AMD and Nvidia vying for your GPU dollar. But, in an interview at CES earlier this month, he’s been saying what we’re all thinking – “it’s unrealistic to think that they’re going to best the likes of NVIDIA or AMD immediately.”

We’re still a little way off from having Intel join the discrete graphics card maelstrom, but we can at least say that next year it’s going to release the Intel Xe and start pushing for gaming GPU dominance with the big two. It’s an ambitious play by Intel, and is likely pushed by the inherent parallel processing chops of graphics silicon and its rise in the datacentre and its use in professional/AI tasks. Where your CPU can have tens of cores, your graphics card can have thousands.

But Nvidia and AMD (as ATI) have been making discrete graphics cards for a long time now, and the hardware is not the only part of the equation that Intel has to nail – the software side of things is just as important in getting your GPU working properly in our gaming PCs.