Intel's Ivy Bridge GPU to support 4K HD resolution

Full HD or 1080p resolution was a thing of wonder back in the day, but now it has become common and therefore not really exciting, anymore. So what’s next? Panasonic showed off their 4K-ready plasma TVs, last year, but as you know, powering so many pixels does require some intense processing power. While today’s discrete graphics cards can easily go beyond that resolution, Intel is aiming at achieving this with their onboard GPU, which will ship inside Ivy Bridge processors, sometime next year.

Going where no IGP has gone before

Intel is very confident about their new technology and say that the Multi-Format Codec or MFX engine is capable of playing multiple 4K videos at the same time. Now, before you get too excited, remember we are talking about simply powering a display with that resolution or decoding such movies, you won’t be able to game at that resolution using just the IGP. We’d like to see them try, but I highly doubt that would happen. In a way, this is more of an evolution, rather than a revolution, since 3 years back, AMD and Nvidia already had IGPs (Integrated Graphics Processors) that could easily do 1080p, so this is not very surprising. Let's hope they launch it before the world ends, you know, 2012 and all.