Arc is Intel's high-performance graphics brand, to take on GeForce and Radeon GPUs

[Shawn Knight]

Highly anticipated: Intel has officially announced its consumer discrete graphics brand. Intel Arc will span hardware, software and services, and stretch over multiple hardware generations. The first products, codenamed Alchemist (formerly DG2), are set to arrive in the first quarter of 2022 in both mobile and desktop form factors.

Alchemist is based on the Xe-HPG microarchitecture and is rumored to consist of up to six models with EU counts ranging from 128 to 512. This first batch of products will feature hardware-based ray tracing along with AI-driven super sampling and full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.

We can’t keep it a secret any longer! So excited to introduce the brand for our High-Performance Graphics: Intel Arc. Find out more. https://t.co/GzGcM8KDq1 #IntelArc pic.twitter.com/OWFbdTyLZy

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 16, 2021

Real-world GPU performance remains a mystery. Intel tweeted some gameplay footage alongside its announcement but without displaying FPS, it’s mostly useless. Hopes are high, however, that Intel’s cards will be able to trade jabs with the AMDs and Nvidias of the world.

“Every game, gamer, and creator has a story, and every story has an Arc.” – Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions.

Future hardware generations will assume the codenames of Battlemage, Celestial and Druid, we’re told.

Here's a sneak peek of pre-production Intel Arc graphics in action. https://t.co/VOMsMN6r2y #IntelArc pic.twitter.com/b9fOsXdRCq

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 16, 2021

Intel clearly wants to become the third major player in the discrete graphics space, and I suspect most gamers would welcome additional competition at this point. That’s not to say that AMD and Nvidia are doing anything wrong, but rather that competition usually brings out the best in all participants. And in this unique time when GPUs are especially hard to come by, a third source to buy from will hopefully only help matters across the board.

Intel promised to share additional details later this year.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/90808-arc-intel-high-performance-graphics-brand.html

 

[Dimitriid]

I have 0 confidence they'll have usable drivers ready at launch, let alone properly optimized ones. I might be pleasantly surprised if they end up being at least as incompetent as AMD was in the past but that will likely live you in a 6600 xt situation all over again: People might pick em up simply cause they're well, actually on sale at the price they claim.

 

[emmzo]

More mining cards...

 

[Geralt]

More cards for the shi*tty miners, unfortunately.

 

[pcnthuziast]

Intel is going to fail miserably in this venture.

 

[mbrowne5061]

More mining cards...

I'm personally hoping that they end up absolutely killing it at mining - but are complete trash as gaming. Let the miners have them.

 

[Shadowboxer]

I’m hoping they can make some decent competition. Nvidia practically has a monopoly at this point.

 

[emmzo]

I'm personally hoping that they end up absolutely killing it at mining - but are complete trash as gaming. Let the miners have them.

Unfortunately, these things are linked together, better card performance, better hashrate for mining. My only hope with Intel, the third player, is, it will increase supply to a point the mining market will be saturated, so the prices could come back to "normal", at least within 10-15% +MSRP.

 

[punctualturn]

If there is a company that its absolutely worse than nvidia with lies is Intel.

So I will wait for a HU review of these before even considering believing their claims.

 

[McMurdeR]

Intel is going to fail miserably in this venture.

The timing might be just blind luck, but even if the launch products fail to impress, they will sell every last chip they can make.

 

[wiyosaya]

It will be interesting to see what the added competition brings to the market, even if the "Arc" marketing tack is rather over-the-top (typical sIntel Hubris), IMO.

 

[wiyosaya]

I'm personally hoping that they end up absolutely killing it at mining - but are complete trash as gaming. Let the miners have them.

Maybe, if that were to happen, nVidia/AMD GPUs would return to reasonable pricing.

 

[wiyosaya]

More cards for the crapto miners, unfortunately.

FTFY

 

[Irata]

If Intel are clever and watching current reviews, they‘ll simply lie about be a bit optimistic about their msrp and reviewers will give at least ten extra points.

 

[Puiu]

Early 2022 is kinda late. They needed to release them this year while AMD and Nvidia still have huge stock issues and next gen cards aren't yet hyped up.

 

[Lounds]

"you asked for a miracle, I give you the FBI(intel)" Hans Grüber.

 

[kiwigraeme]

Interesting times - yeah maybe drivers and features will matter - intel does hardware encoding quite well .
Since everyone is upping their design tools , going to chiplets
AI design etc - I think it's worth Intel going all out
Plus I think there is a lot of crossover to server AI technology .
Ie super big processing boards

 

[Mr Majestyk]

As they say talk is cheap. Let's hold the hype train until we see actual numbers and what driver support will be like. If Intel can deliver something with 3070 ish performance at $50-100 less and similar power then good news.

 

[JamesBlond]

More cards for the shi*tty miners, unfortunately.

I am not a miner, because I only have 2 cards, they are for gaming, but I used my brain, installed Nicehash, and never paid for the cards, they paid for themselves, when I am at work they mine, when im sleeping they mine, but when im gaming, they only game, you should try it, you might see how it can be a good thing to not actually pay to game

 

[Bobbydpue]

I have 0 confidence they'll have usable drivers ready at launch, let alone properly optimized ones. I might be pleasantly surprised if they end up being at least as incompetent as AMD was in the past but that will likely live you in a 6600 xt situation all over again: People might pick em up simply cause they're well, actually on sale at the price they claim.

It's not like they have a regular product release cycle for their GPU's constraining them to a specific date.

 

[Bobbydpue]

Intel is going to fail miserably in this venture.

Based on what objective evidence?

 

[cliffordcooley]

All this unfounded negativity in the comments.

 

[Pastuch]

Intel has more money than Jesus and has been planning this for years. I imagine this will be at least as good as AMD can muster. They can also afford to pay all the game devs to use their tech like Nvidia does.

 

[hwertz]

Let's see how it goes -- Intel's past "gaming" GPUs have not been great (.... several times in the last 20+ years, they've promised gaming cards, only to have them come out late and below performance estimates.) A few other past video card vendors did this in the murky past (when NVidia and ATI were just a few among many). But without revenues from CPUs etc. one or possibly two missteps would get them out of the market (either out of business, or move to selling their GPUs for embedded designs.)

But, I'll wait and see -- Intel has plenty of chip designers, engineers, etc., nothings stopping them from coming up with a new, clean, fast design. It's also possible to have a new model that's based on previous model that's a real dog, get some percent speed up per tweak, but find plenty of tweaks, suddenly your slow design is reasonably quick (die shrink and add more units to the GPU as needed.)

 

[Markoni35]

We don't have enough electricity for electric cars (if they become more popular).
The solution: Produce more crypto-mining cards to waste even more electricity.