Intel Demos Kaby Lake Running Overwatch And Unreal Engine VR Editing On Broadwell-E At IDF

Name: Core i7-6950X
Brand: Core

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 05:17 PM EDT

Kaby Lake And Unreal VR Editing

Overwatch Running On Intel Kaby Lake-Based, Next-Gen Dell XPS 13

This morning’s opening keynote at the annual Intel Developers Forum was rather eventful. In addition to unveiling the Project Alloy merged reality headset, the Project Aero Drone platform, and a number of maker-oriented devices, Intel also showed off its next-generation Kaby Lake-based 7th Generation Core processors and some new virtual reality editing tools built into Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Kaby Lake is the follow-up product to current, 6th Generation Skylake-based Core processors. With Kaby Lake, however, Intel is adding native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, along with a more powerful graphics architecture for improved 3D performance and 4K video processing. Kaby Lake will also bring with it native HDCP 2.2 support and hardware acceleration for HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit video decoding.

To drive those points home, Intel showed off Overwatch running on a next-gen Dell XPS 13 built around a 7th Gen ULV Core i5 processor, in addition to a HP notebook smoothly playing back 4K HDR video. The game settings or resolution, video bitrate, and other details regarding the notebooks weren’t disclosed, however.

Kaby Lake 7th Generation Core-based products should start arriving in the fall.

Intel also used a Broadwell-E based system to demo some cool, multi-threaded VR editing technology that was integrated into Epic’s Unreal Engine. With it, developers can now edit virtual worlds from within the actual VR environment. Watch the video embedded above to see it in action.

Notice The Status Bar At The Lower-Left Of The Window...

Intel ran the VR demo on Broadwell-E to show the benefits of the additional cores available with the processors. Re-rendering the lighting in the environment was more than 2x faster on Broadwell-E than on the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K. For developers that run similar operations many times a day, the performance benefits of Broadwell-E with multi-threaded workloads can save a significant amount of time.

To see just how fast Broadwell-E can be, check out our recent review of the 10-core Core i7-6950X here.

Tags: VR, Overwatch, broadwell-e, kaby lake, idf2016, unrealengine

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com