Intel Arc Alchemist GPU finally expected to launch sometime around May - June

[nanoguy]

The big picture: With the heated GPU market being what it is, Intel's long wait to release its Arc Alchemist graphics cards may reduce its chances to carve out a piece of the GPU market. Prices for Nvidia and AMD cards are going down and availability continues to improve every month, with most signs pointing towards a late May -- early June launch window for A500 and A700 series GPUs.

Intel has already started shipping mobile Arc Alchemist GPUs for devices like the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i and Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 Pro, which pairs 12th generation Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-U processors with an Arc A380 GPU. Early benchmarks from credible sources suggest the A300 series won’t blow socks off in terms of gaming performance, but they will be more battery-friendly than Nvidia and AMD alternatives.

Gamers are mostly interested in the desktop A700 and A500 series Alchemist GPUs, which are widely expected to rival mainstream and upper-middle tier offerings from AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 lineup. These will pack up to 512 compute units and 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory running inside a 175-225 watt power envelope, with a rumored MSRP between $400 and $500.

Of course, even if you’ll be able to find these cards anywhere close to MSRP after launch, availability is still very much in question despite Intel’s promise to ship millions of Arc GPUs to consumers this year. The company has been delaying the launch of Alchemist for months, and a new report from Igor’s Lab confirms that a May launch is increasingly unlikely.

Intel reportedly has yet to send engineering qualification samples of A700 and A500 series GPUs to its partners, who are expecting to receive them by the end of this month. Drivers are still a work in progress, and if Intel learned a lesson with its DG1 experiment, it’s that scaling up its iGPU architecture alone won’t automatically guarantee higher performance in modern games.

We know that Intel wants to compensate with its open-access XeSS upscaling technology, but the company has only demoed it in a handful of games so far. Studios like Ubisoft, 505 Games, IO Interactive, Kojima Productions, PUBG Studios, and Codemasters have promised to integrate XeSS into their games, but it will be interesting to see how quickly it happens. As we’ve seen with Nvidia’s proprietary DLSS and even AMD’s open-source FSR tech, that doesn’t exactly happen overnight - quite the contrary.

Intel’s first Arc desktop GPUs also look set to arrive at a time when Nvidia is looking to ramp up supply for Ampere and AMD is getting ready to refresh its RDNA 2 lineup, so it'll be more difficult for Team Blue to gain mindshare. Still, if AMD can sell a mediocre product like the RX 6500 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 3060 won’t go below $600 even on eBay, anything is possible.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/93710-intel-arc-alchemist-rumored-launch-sometime-may-june.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I may write Intel a letter and tell them that as a consumer, I feel that the best thing they can do to advertise is come up with a simple numbering scheme so consumers automatically know what generation a card is and which card is more powerful.

 

[Achaios]

Haha, delayed again.

Natives of the Indian Subcontinent don't share the western concept of time. To them, deadlines are incomprehensible and time is merely a relative concept to be stretched at will.

 

[yRaz]

OMG< if it doezn't beat 3090's it sucks, just stahp intall! Or that's about how I expect the comments sections to go.

I don't care if they release GPUs with the performance of as a 6500xt as long as it's priced right. If you had a 1070 you can play pretty much anything at 1080p these days with no issues. Can't run RTX but you can't really make realistic use of raytracing on a 3060 anyway and the 3060 is faster than a 1070.

Intel doesn't have to be the best, they just had to be priced right and available.

 

[hahahanoobs]

"You're our last best hope for peace in the graphics card market, don't let this opportunity pass you by. Because, El Paterino, you could become a latter-day hero for literally dozens of PC gamers. And isn't that a legacy worth fighting for?" -PC Gamer

Ew. So dramatic.

 

[Sausagemeat]

Come on Intel. The bar at the moment is super low. You can get a 6500XT for below MSRP in the U.K., people don’t seem to be buying it. But for that money if Intel actually made a decent card it would fly off the shelves.

 

[passwordistaco]

If the rumor is true that the delays have been because of the drivers, they should be using this time to crank out as many cards as possible before launch. I'd rather see a later launch with too much inventory for scalpers to monopolize.

 

[emmzo]

Well, good luck to them, but sorry, fxck first gen of anything. I only hope enough people will buy it so AMD and Nvidia drop prices.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Ouch, now they will be competing against Lovelace and RDNA3. The pricing will need to be keen against current offerings, and supply good. But what about their drivers? Their iGPU drivers suck and I hope they hired a lot of good GPU driver talent for Alchemist.

 

[condelio]

I've read "Intel gpus soon to be released" like a million times already

 

[toooooot]

Happy to see more companies and more video cards. Good luck, Intel!

 

[evolucion8]

OMG< if it doezn't beat 3090's it sucks, just stahp intall! Or that's about how I expect the comments sections to go.

I don't care if they release GPUs with the performance of as a 6500xt as long as it's priced right. If you had a 1070 you can play pretty much anything at 1080p these days with no issues. Can't run RTX but you can't really make realistic use of raytracing on a 3060 anyway and the 3060 is faster than a 1070.

Intel doesn't have to be the best, they just had to be priced right and available.

The moment you called Ray Tracing/DXR as RTX, lost credibility LOL. RTX is an nVidia marketing time for their DXR/Global Ilumination etc in their hardware, how Intel would adapt something that nVidia is not licensing at all?

 

[yRaz]

The moment you called Ray Tracing/DXR as RTX, lost credibility LOL. RTX is an nVidia marketing time for their DXR/Global Ilumination etc in their hardware, how Intel would adapt something that nVidia is not licensing at all?

reading comprehension much?

 

[evolucion8]

reading comprehension much?

Nah, more like less astroturfing, and more objectivity getting facts straight.

 

[yRaz]

Nah, more like less astroturfing, and more objectivity getting facts straight.

I was referring to how the 10 series doesn't have RT cores

 

[evolucion8]

I was referring to how the 10 series doesn't have RT cores

Still looking under my rug where did I actually said anything about Ray Tracing support on Pascal, just was talking about how people label Ray Tracing as RTX when RTX is just an nVidia marketing term for several technologies including Ray Tracing, and they use that term to evaluate other vendor DXR support in the likes of AMD or even Intel, like AMD RTX or Intel RTX, ludicrous.

Reading comprehension much? Oh the irony.

 

[yRaz]

Still looking under my rug where did I actually said anything about Ray Tracing support on Pascal, just was talking about how people label Ray Tracing as RTX when RTX is just an nVidia marketing term for several technologies including Ray Tracing, and they use that term to evaluate other vendor DXR support in the likes of AMD or even Intel, like AMD RTX or Intel RTX, ludicrous.

Reading comprehension much? Oh the irony.

What are you even mad about? Sure, you're right, RTX is marketing jank created by nVidia, but everyone knows what you're talking about when you word it like that. Is that what you wanted to hear?

And, FYI, the 10 series still doesn't have RT cores